In a trade that sheds some light on why the Athletics bid on Hishashi Iwakuma, Oakland today shipped out starting pitcher Vin Mazzaro to the Kansas City Royals along with prospect Justin Marks for outfielder David DeJesus.
Mitch Moreland led off the bottom of the sixth inning Monday night with a single and stood at first with the score knotted at zero. Elvis Andrus was at the plate with Michael Young and Josh Hamilton due next. Given the pitching duel seen so far and expectation for the remainder of the game, an Andrus bunt would not have shocked many people.
Followers of win expectancy rightfully agree with that call not being made. Sacrifice bunts rarely increase a team’s chances to win. It is, however, a bit more complicated to apply the tenets of win probability to an exact situation than it is to speak in broad concepts.
For one, win expectancy is blind to the specific players involved which can play an important part in skewing the numbers. But there are more subtle assumptions present as well that are worth delving into. A pertinent one in this case is that the markov chains inside win expectancy are calibrated around a run environment. Typically, we use the average run environment for the park in play, but on an individual game basis the environment can vary quite wildly due to the two pitchers in the game.
Examining whether a bunt call might have been proper involves figuring out the expected run environment of the game going forward. Based on the pitch counts of Cliff Lee and Tim Lincecum, the strength of the bullpens behind them and the venue, the number I roughly calculated pegged it at 3.4 runs per team per nine innings. Ignoring the chances of a failed attempt and a fielding error and making the simplistic assumption that a sac bunt would move Moreland to second 100% of the time, that presents a bunt play as being worth -1.4% of a win to the Rangers.
So even with the lower run environment, the call is still overall a bad one, but how low would the run environment need to be before a bunt would result in a positive change in win expectancy?
The break even point is around 1.1 runs per team per nine innings, which should give you an idea of how far off the bunt was from being profitable due to the run environment. One point one runs is not a realistic assumption under almost any condition.
How about the timing though? If the same situation presented itself later in the game, with fewer innings left to play, would that make it profitable? It certainly increases the benefit of the bunt play, but it turns out that it still never gets it past the 0% barrier.
There are times that sacrifice bunts are called for probabilistically. Nearly all of those,however, have to do with moving a runner from second to third. To justify moving a runner from first to second, a manager would need it to be late in the game and the run environment to be abnormally low.
Nineteen ninety-six was a special year. Baseball was back for 162 games for the first time since 1993 and baseball had a new star on its hands. After a cup of coffee in ’94 and a brief hello in ’95, Alex Rodriguez secured himself a starting role with the Mariners in ’96 and has not looked back since. Rodriguez would league the American League in runs (141), doubles (54), total bases (379) and batting average (.358) that year while putting up a triple slash line of .358/.414/.631, good for a .444 wOBA. Rodriguez was just 20 years old at the time.
It is 14 years later and baseball has another 20-year-old on its stardom radar screen. Jason Heyward isn’t having near the sort of season that Rodriguez had back then, his power numbers falling way short, but that is no knock against Jason. He’s still having a borderline MVP caliber season and in fact is sharing one distinction with Rodriguez’s ’96 season: an OBP over .400.
Looking at every player season since integration in 1947, only two other players had a better OBP at Heyward’s age. One of them was Rodriguez’s .414 mark in 1996, but Heyward’s is arguably more impressive given that the league average OBP in A-Rod’s year was .350 compared to .324 for the NL this year. On an OBP+ scale, only Al Kaline’s 1955 .421 OBP surpasses Heyward’s current achievement.
Heyward certainly has the raw power to be a slugger, but he lacks the proper approach to be a 40-homerun hitter. He’s always been more of a ground ball hitter but thanks to his already good discipline skills, Heyward does not have to rely on getting those home runs to succeed.
Of the 11 people to OBP > .400 before 23 since integration:
6 are in the Hall of Fame
2 will be (Albert Pujols, A-Rod)
1 might be (Adam Dunn)
1 is Heyward
And the other was Billy Goodman who did it when the league OBP was .349
Back in early July, Dave Cameron wrote in his trade value series that “Almost everyone who is this good at this age becomes a superstar, and few doubt that Heyward is headed that way.” It’s easy to get too ahead of ourselves in projecting current performance to sustain itself into the future, but it might be worth considering if Heyward isn’t headed to super stardom but instead might already be there.
R.A. Dickey has never managed to go an entire season without at least some time spent in the Minor Leagues. Perhaps 2011 will break that streak because the Mets certainly have to be a little regretful of the 60.2 innings they had Dickey spend in Buffalo to begin 2010.
Dickey wasn’t much different in Triple-A this season then he has been in the past aside from a reduced BABIP and a higher ground ball rate. Then again, Dickey has always been better than the Triple-A level and this season was no different with Dickey accumulating in the range of about 1.5 WAR if we extended the formula to the Minor Leagues. Called up to the big leagues and inserted into the Mets rotation as of May 19. It wasn’t an auspicious beginning with four walks and two strikeouts in six innings, but things only got better from there. In the 120.1 innings since that first start, Dickey has recorded 83 strikeouts and just 27 walks and one hit batter.
What’s working for Dickey? Not surprisingly, it’s his knuckle ball. Never before has he committed to it so fervently, throwing it over 80% of the time and getting good results. And despite the increase in knuckle balls, Dickey has halved his walk rate from last season and kept his strikeouts level. He’s even manged to keep more batted balls on the ground. Also despite the heavy use of a knuckler, Dickey’s wild pitch and passed ball rate (just one per 240 pitches) is merely 59th amongst all pitchers with at least 1,000 pitches in 2010.
Coming into play today Dickey is sporting a sparkling 2.64 ERA but more importantly, his FIP is a solid 3.44 and his 3.68 xFIP points to a pitcher not succeeding through luck alone. And that is before you consider that Dickey might deserve a discount on his FIP due to his knuckleball. His 2.5 WAR to date exceeds his previous career best of 1.9 with the Rangers in 2003. That’s a significant bounce back from a really poor 2009 season spent mostly in the Twins’ bullpen.
Even though he has bounced around the league for the past ten seasons, Dickey has yet to accumulate enough service time to qualify as a Major League free agent and thus the Mets still retain arbitration rights to him. It’s always fun to take heed of players such as Dickey who have found some, perhaps fleeting, success after years of struggle. Will he be able to stick an entire season in a big league rotation next season?
While pulling some numbers last night about Joey Votto for my post on the Triple Crown* I stumbled across Joey Votto’s number of infield pop ups this season. It’s zero. According to BIS, Joey Votto has yet to hit a single fly ball that hasn’t at least reached the outfield grass.
*For what it’s worth, I think the edge goes to Votto over Pujols because I believe more in his high batting average than ZiPS does and I think his home field advantage in home runs and RBIs puts him in a better situation. However, it wasn’t a conclusion based on any exhaustive study of projections and I thought that was obvious since I didn’t back it up with anything. It was a single sentence reflecting a personal feeling only.
In case you were wondering, that is pretty impressive. The list of qualified hitters who have managed an infield fly per fly ball (IFFB%) rate under 1.0 since 2002:
2004 Larry Bigbie 0.0%
2009 Ryan Howard 0.6%
2009 Derek Jeter 0.8%
2006 Bobby Abreu 0.8%
Derek Jeter makes the list once and several times was amongst baseball’s best. He has perhaps best been consistent in avoiding hitting pop ups with 4.9% being his highest rate, which is still lower than the league average.
Larry Bigbie is an interesting case. 2004 was certainly the high mark of his short Major League career and he still ended up as a below average player with only a slightly above average bat. 2004 was the only season that Bigbie qualified for the batting title otherwise he would be all over this list. According to BIS, and Retrosheet’s markers have a similar interpretation, Larry Bigbie hit exactly one infield fly ball in his Major League career over 1,367 trips to the plate.
Like Jeter and Bigbie, Votto has never been one to hit into many pop ups. More impressively, he’s done it as a hitter not inclined to ground balls the way Jeter and Bigbie are or were. Votto’s career 42% ground ball rate is much lower than either Jeter’s 52% or Bigbie’s 56%. Votto doesn’t shy away from hitting fly balls, he just hits them with consistent power.
The word around the twittersphere is that Brian Fuentes is heading to the Twins with a player to be named later heading back in return. It is doubtful that the PTBNL is of any real value, but the Angels certainly have no need for a closer whose contract ends this season. I can say that with pretty good confidence because the vesting option on Fuentes’ contract stipulates that he needs to finish 55 games in 2010 to activate it. Fuentes is at 33 this season and is headed to a team with at least two relievers ahead of him for saves.
Since the Twins have little to worry about Fuentes’ vesting option, this can be seen as simply a very short-term rental. This looks like just a little extra insurance to better the Twins’ odds of outlasting the White Sox for the AL Central title. My question is whether adding Brian Fuentes actually betters the bullpen.
After a down season in 2009, Fuentes has not rebounded meaningfully. His fastball speed is still down and the ground balls are even more infrequent in nature. Fuentes has regained some of his lost strikeout rate, but not a lot and he’s been treading water thanks in part to his .250 BABIP. Fuentes’ tenure with Anaheim paints him as being close to a replacement-level reliever.
The Twins have had a very strong bullpen this year. Jeff Manship, Matt Guerrier and Glen Perkins are the only active members of the team who have posted a FIP above four while in the bullpen. Perkins was done in a very small sample and he’s more of a starter anyways.
This move certainly makes the claiming of Randy Flores even more curious as Fuentes is simply a better version of Flores and Fuentes isn’t even all that good. If the idea is to ditch their claim on Flores and replace him with Fuentes to be their LOOGY, that individual move at least makes sense. If the Twins keep both of them, then I’m wondering who loses his job to make room because there’s a decent chance that Fuentes is less useful. I understand the motivation behind wanting to grab whatever improvement is out there, but I’m left feeling there isn’t much or any improvement to be had in this case.
Baseball hasn’t seen a hitting Triple Crown since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967 and the National League has been dry since Joe Medwick in 1937. While never common, there were 13 seasons between 1901 and 1967 that saw a Triple Crown winner, a little under 10% of the time.
The traditional Triple Crown is no longer as impressive as it once was given what we know about measuring individual offensive performance and the contextual nature of RBIs. Still, it remains a milestone that is appreciated and known among nearly all fans and it is hard to win the Crown without putting together a legitimately fantastic season. While it remains unlikely that anyone accomplishes it this season, there are several interesting candidates.
The two most likely winners are both in the National League. Albert Pujols: the expected, and Joey Votto: the surprise. Votto came into play today currently atop the league in batting average with Pujols in third, seven points back. Seven points is a lot to make up in just over a month, but it is certainly doable if Votto’s runs into a string of bad luck. Meanwhile Pujols enjoys the league lead in both home runs and RBIs each by two over Votto. The edge has to go to Votto for the moment.
Finishing with the least likely of the three, Miguel Cabrera is having a fantastic season for the Tigers. Currently the AL leader in RBIs by seven over Alex Rodriguez, Cabrera should be able to relatively coast to the AL title there with A-Rod now on the disabled list. The other two legs look more difficult for Cabrera. He’s sitting 14 points behind Josh Hamilton for the batting title but even more daunting is the nine home runs by which he trails Jose Bautista. Cabrera is almost certainly not going to be able to catch Bautista, but his season at the plate remains worthy of highlighting.
Not nearly as impressive, but related to the topic at hand is the pitching version of the Triple Crown: ERA, strikeouts, and wins in which both Roy Halladay and Adam Wainwright have a shot at in the NL. Halladay has 15 more strikeouts than Wainwright but Wainwright leads in both wins and ERA. Halladay, however, is right behind him in both, trailing by a single win and just four ERA points.
In a season that’s already pushing the boundaries on the historic, the first Triple Crown winner in 40 years could cement 2010 as one to remember.
I was absent-mindedly keeping track of the Seattle and Boston doubleheader today when I decided that it felt to me that the game was progressing quickly. The kernel of a thought gave rise to me pondering other doubleheaders that I had watched and I had a fuzzy recollection of those also moving quickly as well. Thus, a hypothesis was born. Knowing that they have to play two games in one day, do players attempt to play at a quicker pace?
Far be it for me simply to toss out a hypothesis without taking steps to try to prove it. After all, I wouldn’t want to be like Damien Cox. Lucky for me —and for all of us— we live in a reality where Retrosheet exists and is free and totally awesome.
Testing the theory is a bit more complicated than simply comparing the average game duration for doubleheaders against single game days. There’s historical context that needs to be applied. Games take longer to complete now than they used to and there used to be more doubleheaders. Therefore taking the average doubleheader duration would result in a skew toward earlier seasons, which had smaller durations.
To get around that, I broke up each season into a separate entry for normal games and doubleheader games and compared them down the line. Over the years 1952 through 2009, the average doubleheader game took 99.8% as long to finish as a normal game. Technically, they do appear to take a shorter amount of time to compete but the margin is so incredibly small and the sample size on doubleheader games small enough that I feel this is not a statistically large enough difference to prove the hypothesis.
It might be tempting to think that nothing was learned, but that’s not true. Proving a theory wrong —or at least showing it currently impossible to prove correct— is still added information. Besides, I made this cool line chart!
I find it interesting that game times were fairly stable from 1952 (147 minutes) through 1976 (149 minutes) and from 1991 (174 minutes) to present day (175 minutes). That was one steep and steady climb.
John Lackey certainly hasn’t been the pitcher that the Red Sox hoped they would be getting when they signed him for over $80 million this past winter. As an Angel, Lackey had consistently run xFIPs right near the 4.00 mark with stable rates in strikeouts, walks and ground balls. 2010 John Lackey however has fewer strikeouts and a lot more walks raising his xFIP to 4.63 coming into play today. That is the highest mark of Lackey’s career and does not portend well for the next four seasons to Boston.
Lackey’s pitch types and frequencies have not changed much if at all and signing with Boston did not mean a change in leagues. While the AL East might appear to pose stiffer competition than the AL West did, when discussing an individual pitcher, the sample sizes vary too much to be generalized. Lackey’s average hitter faced his season had a .737 OPS while it was .755 and .766 the previous two seasons with Anaheim. Even adjusting for the overall decline in offense this season, Lackey has faced weaker hitters in 2010 than in either 2009 or 2008 and yet his performance has declined noticeably.
Lackey’s struggles can be parsed further by examining his splits. His performance against right-handed hitters remains close to his established levels while he has struggled mightily against southpaws this season. Lackey’s strikeout to walk rate versus righties was 3.0 in 2008, was 2.9 last year and is at 2.9 this season. Versus a lefty it has slipped from 3.6 in 2008 and 3.1 in 2009 all the way to 1.3 in 2010. John Lackey isn’t facing significantly more lefties this season than he did in the past, but perhaps he should be given his collapse against them this year.
As always with splits, it’s a small sample and more time will be needed before being able to see if this is a mere blip or if this is something that will severely hamper his ability going forward. Not being able to retire other handed hitters will lead to teams more dramatically stacking their lineups and also makes the chances for a return of the 4.00 xFIP version of Lackey much less likely.
Shortly after Arizona traded him to the White Sox before the start 2008 season, Carlos Quentin unleashed a monster season on the American League. Since then, Quentin’s performances have been disappointing to put it mildly. I endeavored to find out what’s different between the All-Star worthy Carlos Quentin of 2008 and below replacement level Carlos Quentin since.
Quentin posted a career best .278 batting average on balls in play during 2008. Coupled with a marked drop in his strikeout rate –what had been 24% the previous season fell to 17%– Quentin saw his batting average spike to up .288. Was there anything systemic that aided the rise in BABIP? It’s difficult to determine. Quentin did hit into fewer pop outs once in Chicago, a feat that dramatically helps to improve one’s BABIP, but we’re not talking about an earth shattering deviation and his other batted ball rates remained fairly consistent.
Furthermore, Quentin repeated the lower infield fly rate in 2009 but saw his BABIP sink all the way to.221. Hitting fewer ground balls in 2009 obviously has an effect but a small one, too small to account for the entire change unless you treat 2008 as an outlier.
Further worsening the drop off from 2008 is a decline in walk rate. It peaked in 2008 at 12% but fell to 8% last season and though it has rebounded to 10% in 2010, his strikeouts are up as well, wiping out the positive growth in walks. Quentin’s newfound penchant for offering more at out of zone pitches is partly a culprit as it has risen from 26% in 2008 to 29% in 2009 and now stands at 31%. It is hard to draw walks when you swing at the pitches that you do get outside the strike zone.
Despite that humongous drop in walk rate and batting average, Quentin still maintains an overall above average hitting line with wRC+s of 104 and 121 after his monstrous 154 in 2008. However his defense, which was never much to write about, has collapsed according to UZR. Without a superstar-level offensive output, the total package is quite lacking and Quentin has totaled up -0.3 WAR since that much heralded Chicago debut year.