Archive for 2017

Two balls and no strikes, one ball and no strikes — those are the counts that are called hitter’s counts. Pitchers are forced into a predictable corner, since they have to get back into the count, and are more likely to throw a fastball so they can put it in the strike zone. They have to come into the zone, at least, and that’s always better for the hitter. Some of these things are true, and important to the lesson the 23-year-old Cody Reed is currently trying to learn from 28-year-old former teammate Dan Straily. Some of these things are also not true.

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Over the weekend, I attended the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and on Friday, I attended a couple of the presentations of research papers that were baseball-oriented. The first one, presented by John Salmon (based on work he did with Willie Harrison), was titled “Bullpen Strategies for Major League Baseball“, which is obviously a hot topic in the game right now. But while the title made the paper sound like it might touch on Andrew Miller’s postseason usage, the part of the talk I found most interesting actually had more to do with starting pitchers.

In the first half of Salmon’s presentation, he talked about home field advantage, and particularly, how the data shows that one of the primary factors in a home team’s edge might be that their starting pitcher just takes the mound first. While Jeff Zimmerman wrote about this here on FanGraphs back in 2013, I must have missed that piece, because this was new information to me. But Salmon is correct that the data is clear that the gap in performance between the home and road team in the first inning dwarfs the difference in every other inning.

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When I interviewed him in April 2013, Jason Hammel was a 30-year-old pitcher yet to hit his stride. Following his previous path, he went on to have a ho-hum season. In 26 appearances for the Orioles — 23 of them of them as a starter — Hammel had seven wins, a 4.97 ERA, and a 6.2 K/9. His two-seamer and slider showed signs of coming around, but for all intents and purposes, he was a run-of-the-mill, back-of-the-rotation righty.

That has changed. Since originally joining the Chicago Cubs prior to the 2014 season, Hammel has fashioned a 3.68 ERA and fanned 8.3 batters per nine innings. Last year, he won a career-high 15 games for the World Series champions. The cerebral 6-foot-6 hurler is now a 34-year-old Kansas City Royal, having inked a two-year, $16 million deal with the AL Central club over the offseason.

Hammel discussed his mid-career emergence, which was fueled by an improved slider and a subsequent confab with a sexagenarian guru, in the waning days of February.

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Hammel on what has changed since our 2013 conversation: “A big part of [becoming more successful] was throwing a slider for a strike. It was kind of the idea of pitching backwards. Before, I never had a breaking ball that I could start with. I was throwing a curveball more than a slider, and the curveball is more of a… I get a lot of takes on it, because it’s a bigger break. I had to find something else with spin that I could put in the zone. The two-seamer has been a big, big pitch for me, and the two-seamer and slider complement each other really well, because they’re going two separate directions.

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LAKELAND, Fla. — Monday perhaps offered a glimpse of the Dylan Bundy we’ve been waiting for on a windy, sunny afternoon at Joker Marchant Stadium.

In the bottom of the first, the Orioles were so sure a bending Bundy curveball froze Nick Castellanos for a third strike that Bundy and the rest of the infield took a collective step to the visiting third-base dugout before home-plate umpire Jerry Layne signaled a strikeout.

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Two years ago, Max Scherzer and Jon Lester signed deals worth a total of $365 million between them, agreements which would keep both players employed into their age-36 seasons. The accepted wisdom, dating back at least as far as Mike Hampton and Barry Zito, is that signing free-agent starting pitchers to massive contracts into their 30s is a poor idea. If early returns are any indication, last season’s deal for Zack Greinke is unlikely to serve as evidence to the contrary. David Price’s injury scare, meanwhile, provides another reminder of the risks inherent to long-term agreements with pitchers.

Not all such commitments are doomed, however. We’re just entering the third year of the contracts signed by Scherzer and Lester, for example, and so far those deals look quite good.

Two offseasons ago, Lester and Scherzer represented the only two players to receive a contract of $100 million or more. Eight other players signed for at least $50 million, though. All 10 such contracts are listed below. For each player, I’ve also provided an estimate of the value he would have been expected to provide starting with the time he signed. To calculate this estimated value, I began with each player’s WAR forecast from the 2015 FanGraphs Depth chart projections, started with $7.5 million per win, added 5% inflation per year, and applied a standard aging curve. The rightmost column indicates whether the player in question was expected to outperform or underperform the cost of his contract.

The surplus and deficit figures for individual players vary by quite a bit. Overall, however, the actual contract and value numbers are within 1% of each other.

It might be hard to believe that, at the time, projection systems were calling for Chase Headley to record $100 million in value. Remember, though, that he had averaged more than five wins over the three previous seasons and had just completed a four-WAR year. From this point, it looked like Scherzer, Lester, and Hanley Ramirez signed contracts pretty close to their expected value. The number for Scherzer is probably even closer than what we see above after accounting for his deferrals, as he makes just $15 million per season over the playing life of the contract.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Carter Capps, Noah Syndergaard, and salary distributions, then preview the Angels’ 2017 season with Pedro Moura of The LA Times and the Diamondbacks’ 2017 season with Nick Piecoro of AZCentral Sports.

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Every week, for the Effectively Wild podcast, we solicit listener emails and questions. The questions lean heavily toward the hypothetical and absurd, and an email we got last week asked what it would look like if some given eccentric baseball team owner cared only about winning the most games in spring training. What would the preparation be like? What would the strategy be like? How, in general, would the baseball team look?

You could argue that baseball team would look a lot like the Angels. Last Friday afternoon, against the Brewers, the Angels rallied back from an early 3-0 deficit. They tied the game in the fourth, and after they eventually fell behind again, they rallied again, before walking off in the bottom of the ninth. A player named David Fletcher singled against a player named Tyler Spurlin, and the single scored a player named Matt Williams, but not that Matt Williams. The Angels stretched their spring-training record to 7-0. They stretched their spring-training unbeaten streak to 18.

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Over the weekend, I had the fortune of attending the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and participating on the baseball panel with Mike Petriello, Harry Pavlidis, Patrick Young, and Brian Kenny, which was a lot of fun. While the baseball panel was my only actual obligation at the conference, Petriello was doing double duty, having just presented — along with Greg Cain, one of the lead engineers at MLBAM — the latest update to Statcast, and introducing two new public metrics for 2017, Catch Probability and Hit Probability. These are the kinds of numbers people have been hoping for, and are one of the first steps in moving from collecting interesting single data points into providing more valuable calculations based on the combination of factors the system is measuring.

To help promote the new metrics, Jeff Passan wrote a piece on Statcast over at Yahoo, focusing mostly on what Statcast could do in the future.

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Perhaps no player in Florida is the object of greater expectations this spring than Gary Sanchez.

Consider: in the fantasy baseball world, only Buster Posey is being drafted earlier at catcher. Generally conservative projection systems forecast that Sanchez will be a star this season. ZiPS pegs Sanchez for 27 homers a 112 wRC+ and a 3.4 WAR season. PECOTA’s 70th percentile outlook has Sanchez recording 33 homers, a .504 slugging mark, and 4.8 wins. And the Fans’ average crowdsourced projection for Sanchez is a .274/.344/.488 slash line and 5.4 WAR season. The Fans believe, in other words, that Sanchez and Bryce Harper are going to produce similar value this season.

Last week, ESPN ran a poll asking respondents to guess how many home runs Sanchez will hit in 2017. Fewer than 10 home runs? That option received 1% of votes. How about 10 to 20 homers — i.e. the range within which he’s resided over each of his first five professional seasons in the minors? That seems like a reasonable wager, right? Only 4% agreed.

The most popular range was 21-30 homers, receiving 44% of votes. Forty-one percent predicted he will slug between 31-40 homers, and 10% think he will hit more than 40.

There’s much to like about Sanchez. This is a player with pedigree, who was regraded as the top catcher in the 2009 international class, and perhaps the second-best bat in that class after Miguel Sano.

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