If you haven’t already, go read David Laurila’s Q&A this morning with Dan Rosenheck, writer for the Economist and New York Times, who gave a presentation on predicting BABIP at the Sloan Conference last week. In that piece, Rosenheck notes that he created a model using just two variables — infield fly rate and rate of contact on strikes — that helped explain 15% of the variance in a pitcher’s future BABIP. The part about infield flies helping reduce BABIP has been noted before, as others have created takeoffs of ERA estimators that incorporate batted ball data — SIERA, tRA, bbFIP, etc… — and Steve Staude wrote a Community Blog post on this topic back in October, also identifying infield fly rate as a significant explanatory tool for BABIP. The potential explanatory effects of inducing popups and the link to Z-Contact% is fascinating, however, and makes Rosenheck’s study a real step forward.

It makes perfect sense that infield flies would help explain some of the variation in a pitcher’s BABIP, of course, since infield flies are almost always outs. In fact, in 2012, there were 4,377 batted balls that were categorized as infield flies in Major League Baseball, and only 13 of those went for base hits. Another 28 did not result in an out due to an error by the fielder, but even with 41 non-outs, that leaves IFFBs with an out rate of 99.1%.

Infield flies are, for all practical purposes, the same as a strikeout. They are basically an automatic out, runners do not advance on infield flies, and perhaps most importantly, we can state with a pretty high level of confidence that the relative abilities of the defenders have nothing to do with the outcome of the play. Sure, maybe you or I wouldn’t turn every IFFB into an out, but for players selected at the Major League level, there is no real differentiation in their ability to catch a pop fly.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the wake of the Biogenesis reports linking several more Major League players to a PED supplier, Bud Selig has begun to talk about enacting stiffer penalties for failed drug tests. From last week:

“The time has come to make meaningful adjustments to our penalties,” said Selig, according to CBSSports.com’s Jon Heyman.”We need to do everything possible to deter the use of performance enhancing drugs … [the recent Biogenesis investigation has] driven my intensity to increase the toughness of our PED penalties … Apparently the penalties haven’t deterred some players.”

And then, earlier this week, Selig made this statement:

“If people want to continue to do what they shouldn’t do, then the one thing that you have to do is you have to have stricter penalties,” Selig said. “It’s as simple as that.”

If only it really were as simple as that.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, the Angels renewed Mike Trout’s contract, opting to pay him $510,000 — $20,000 over the league minimum — for the 2013 season. Because of how great Trout was last year, this has caused some backlash, including these comments from Trout’s agent:

“I asked only that the Angels compensate Mike fairly for his historic 2012 season, given his service time,” Landis said in an email to the Times. “In my opinion, this contract falls well short of a ‘fair’ contract, and I have voiced this to the Angels throughout the process.

While Trout’s renewal has gotten some attention, the reality is that the Angels are just following standard operating procedures for MLB teams. Giancarlo Stanton just had his contract renewed for the third time, and he’s going to make just $537,000 this year, the first year he’s cracked $500K in salary. The Dodgers renewed Clayton Kershaw’s contract three times as well, paying him $404,000 in 2009, $440,000 in 2010, and $500,000 in 2011. Jason Heyward was paid just $496,000 for his second big league season and $565,000 for his third year. This isn’t just the Angels being cheap. This is the pay scale that MLB teams operate on. This is the pay scale that the player’s association has collectively bargained.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees have a long standing policy against negotiating contract extensions for players under contract, preferring instead to wait until the player reaches free agency to hash out a new deal. They even held that line with Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, two of the iconic players in franchise history, so it hasn’t just been selectively applied here and there. So, it was pretty interesting to hear that the Yankees are ignoring that policy with Robinson Cano, and have confirmed that they recently made Scott Boras a “significant offer” to get him from becoming a free agent after the season.

Brian Cashman’s answer for why they’ve changed course with Cano:

“Since we’re the team, we have a right to change our minds and adjust the policy whenever, especially ownership,” Cashman said. “It’s not like it’s a country club, and here’s the code of conduct that you can’t deviate from. We’ve had a history of doing things a certain way, but it doesn’t mean that it has to be that way every day.”

For the Yankees to shift policy and extend Cano an offer now suggests that they’re both a little scared of what his price might be if he gets to free agency, and that they’re comfortable with how well he’ll age that they don’t need to see his age-30 season before deciding to sign up for the rest of his decline phase. The fear about his price if the Dodgers get involved is certainly valid, but should the fact that Cano is a second baseman scare the Yankees away from making a long term commitment to him before they have gathered all the information possible by letting him play out the 2013 season?

Read the rest of this entry »

Four years ago, I wrote a post on “Fixing the WBC” that revolved around one primary suggestion: move the timing of the event to mid-season. Many of the reservations that teams have about their players participating in the event have to do with the injury risks of getting away from a normal pre-season workout, and moving the event to mid-season — in that piece, I suggested just replacing the All-Star Game with the WBC and making the break a few days longer — would eliminate that primary concern.

However, it’s not a particularly realistic suggestion. The All-Star Game is a big money maker for Major League Baseball, and a sport as steeped in tradition as MLB isn’t going to simply cast it aside once every four years. While fully represented WBC squads playing meaningful games would almost certainly be more entertaining than any AL/NL All-Star clash, MLB’s preference is clearly for both events to be highly successful, rather than choosing one over the other. Just from a financial perspective, canceling the All-Star Game is probably a non-starter, so even if I think the WBC would work better mid-season, it’s probably not a feasible idea.

However, I do think that there’s one aspect of the mid-season WBC suggestion that could easily be ported over to the current timeframe and would make the event both more enjoyable and increase participation from MLB players: make the entire event a single elimination tournament, March Madness style.

Read the rest of this entry »

With the ZIPS projections now loaded onto the site and the player pages, I thought it’d be fun to take a look at a few examples where ZIPS and Steamer — probably my two preferred projection systems at the moment — differ this year, and whether there’s anything in particular we can learn from those differences.

First, I wanted to whittle down the population of players that I was dealing with. While I appreciate Steamer’s pluckiness, 4,136 projections for position players might be a little bit of overkill. I, for one, am not overly concerned with how Jeyckol De Leon is going to perform this year. Maybe it’s just me.

ZIPS projects a slightly more sane number of position players — 1,046, to be exact — but even that is still a little unwieldy, as a good chunk of those guys are sub-replacement level minor leaguers who aren’t going to see the Majors this year. By and large, we care mostly about the projections for players who are going to see substantial regular playing time in the big leagues this year, or at least, I do. Carson can care about all the fringe prospects he wants; I’ll leave that to him.

So, in order to get a list of projections for guys we care about, I excluded players who had never been in the majors or were projected to be below replacement level, leaving us with 601 Major League position players. That was still a little unwieldy, though, so I took the top 180 players by the average WAR of the two systems, which gave us a good selection of players that are projected to be league average or better by one of the two systems.

From there, it was a pretty simple sorting task to find some big differences, but many of them are driven by assumptions about playing time rather than big gaps in the actual projections. For instance, ZIPS lists Brett Jackson as a +2.5 WAR player, while Steamer comes in at just +0.9, which seems like a huge difference of opinion until you realize that the ZIPS number is based on 626 PA and the Steamer number is based on 274 PA. Rescale them both to 600 PA, and the gap is just 2.4/2.0, showing that the two systems are essentially in agreement on Jackson’s overall profile for 2013.

Since I care more about the differences in the projected performances than in the playing time gaps, we’ll focus on the big discrepancies in projections per 600 plate appearances (or 450 PA for catchers). Putting things on the same playing time scale will inflate the numbers of part-time players and injured guys while depressing the numbers of durable iron men, but we’ve already gotten rid of most of the part-time guys with our filtering, so that’s a trade-off I’m willing to make. Oh, and thankfully, the two systems were already on almost identical scales for these players, so there was no need to make any adjustments to the numbers as we did with the Fans projections last week.

Long introduction finished… on to the differences. We’ll start with the 14 players where Steamer projects at least +1 additional WAR per full season (600 PA non-catchers, 450 PA catchers):

Read the rest of this entry »

The idea for this post came about from reports last week that the Yankees were considering flipping Brett Gardner and Curtis Granderson on defense, with Gardner taking over in center and Granderson shifting to left field. Of course, Granderson had his forearm broken by a J.A. Happ fastball yesterday, so now the decision has been made for the Yankees, as Gardner will start the season in center field. However, the Yankees will still have to decide what to do when Granderson returns from the DL in May, and they aren’t the only team looking at pairing a couple of center fielder in their outfield this year.

The Angels are shifting Mike Trout to left field because they’re going to give Peter Bourjos a chance to play regularly. The Indians are moving Michael Brantley to left field because they signed Michael Bourn. The A’s are going to use Chris Young all over the outfield because they have Coco Crisp already. In some cases — Trout and Bourjos, for instance — the defensive excellence of both means that there’s probably no wrong answer, as either could play center field and have it look like the right decision. But, in New York, the question was a little more interesting, as Gardner is generally considered to be a better defensive player, and flipping their positions was a consideration based upon improving the overall defensive quality of the Yankees outfield.

It makes sense, after all, to have your best defenders play where the ball is going to be hit the most often, but how much does it actually matter? What’s the magnitude of the difference between having Gardner in center and Granderson in left versus the alignment the Yankees have run out the last few years?

Read the rest of this entry »