When we tell a lie, it’s often rooted in fact. It’s tough to just completely pull a lie out of thin air; somewhere, entrenched deep down within a lie, there’s a factual base. But we start with that small fact, and we turn it into a big lie, and at first we know not to believe that lie but over time, if we continue to lie, two things begin to happen. One, the lie begins to expand. We add in new layers, hyperbolize the already fictitious tale, and turn it into something larger than we’d ever intended. Two, we begin to believe that lie. We’re not aware of this happening, but tell a lie enough times and you’ll forget where you started. That’s how you really wind up in trouble.

Rich Hill felt like a lie last season. I’m still not sure I believe it happened. And, as if I was the one who told the Great Rich Hill Lie of 2015, I began to embellish the story. Two days ago, I’d have bet good money that Rich Hill did what he did last year over 10 or more starts. Give me enough time and I’d have said he did it over a full season. But alas! Rich Hill was only literally Clayton Kershaw for four starts, not 10 or 20 or 33.

But Rich Hill being literally Clayton Kershaw for any amount of time last year still seems like a lie, and when we look at the numbers, it’s almost impossible to make sense of them. It took long enough for us to come to terms that what Clayton Kershaw does is just what he does. We can’t have a second one. When we see 36 strikeouts in 106 batters faced, what does that mean? What does five walks mean? Half of balls in play on the ground — what’s that? In just four starts, these types of numbers have so little context, it almost does more harm than good to think about them. So naturally, we go deeper.

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It’s hard to find a flaw within Francisco Lindor’s 2015 rookie season. The numbers say he was a top-five defensive shortstop in baseball; the eye test agrees. He had one of the best offensive debuts by a shortstop on record, combining plus on-base skills with surprising power. He even patched up his weak link from the minor leagues — baserunning efficiency — by stealing 12 bases in 14 attempts at the major league level. Adjusting for playing time, Lindor was one of the 10 most valuable players in baseball last season, using our WAR figure here on the site.

Lindor was excellent across the board, but he wasn’t the best at anything. He wasn’t the very best defender, but he was close. He wasn’t the very best hitting rookie shortstop of all time, but he was close. He wasn’t the very best baserunner, or the number one most valuable player on a per-plate appearance basis, but he was close. There was one leaderboard though, where you can find Lindor at the top, and, coincidentally, it’s also where you can find Lindor’s only real blemish.

Francisco Lindor, in the midst of one of the greatest offensive seasons by a rookie shortstop in history, led all of baseball in sacrifice bunts, with 13, despite playing in fewer than 100 games.

By this point, I don’t think anyone needs too big a primer on sacrifice bunting. It’s certainly got its place as a valuable tool — late-inning, need one run, man on first, no outs, weak and/or slow hitter at the plate, move him over. But there’s a reason sacrifice bunts are on a 90-year decline — because they’re very rarely a wise play, and the more information teams have gained over time, the more that’s become obvious.

Let Indians manager Terry Francona explain:

Outs are valuable, they’re finite, and sacrifice bunts give them away with limited reward. Got it. Everyone understands this. Lindor’s manager understands this. So then, what was going on?

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12:01

The Dude of NY: And people say A’s fans have nothing to look forward to in 2016!

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Overreaction season is underway. Each year, it starts sometime around mid-March, and lasts until… anyone have the date? Last Monday of May? No, that’s Memorial Day. This is embarrassing; I’m drawing a blank here. If anyone has this year’s date for the end of Overreaction Season, let me know. It lasts well into the regular season — I know that much — and I know that it’s already begun.

As you may have heard, Maikel Franco has played in 11 Spring Training games, and Maikel Franco has hit six home runs. During last year’s Spring Training, Franco hit zero home runs, and then he went on to have an excellent rookie season, so we understand how little these things matter, but it’s hard to ignore Maikel Franco right now. If, say, Darin Ruf were the one doing this, it might be easier to cast aside as one of those weird Spring Training things, but it’s not Darin Ruf; rather, it’s a top prospect, one who either met or exceeded all expectations in his rookie year and is being looked to as one of very few bright spots on the 2016 Phillies, and he’s doing in the games that don’t matter exactly what everyone hopes he’ll do in the games that do. Don’t get me wrong — it’s definitely still just a weird Spring Training thing. But it’s the kind of weird Spring Training thing that feels worth looking into a bit.

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If it weren’t for Bryce Harper, fans of the Washington Nationals might be hard-pressed to admit 2015 ever happened. The team began last season with expectations as high as this year’s Cubs (sorry, Cubs fans) and ended it with a symbolic choke. Nobody could stay off the disabled list — Anthony Rendon, Jayson Werth, Denard Span and Ryan Zimmerman were all hindered by injuries — and the ones who could — Ian Desmond and Wilson Ramos — became liabilities at the plate, seemingly overnight.

But it was the pitching that truly got the hype train a-rollin’ in the preseason — an already star-studded staff with Max Scherzer as the sweetest cherry on top — and the pitching didn’t disappoint. Stephen Strasburg had a rough go of things in the first month and and Doug Fister had his fair share of struggles, but when it was all said and done, the rotation finished with a top-three WAR, a top-five FIP and a top-10 ERA. The expectation was that Washington’s starting pitching would be elite — it ran five deep with proven, quality arms — and Washington’s starting pitching was elite. But even proven arms need to adapt, lest they lose their title of proven. And while, on the surface, Washington’s hurlers for the most part looked like themselves, every member of the starting rotation made an adjustment, all similar in nature but unique to each individual. Unlike a tweak to one’s mechanics or pitch mix, it’s the type of adjustment that alters the very foundation of a pitcher’s DNA — every member of the Nationals starting rotation changed the way they throw their fastball.

Generally speaking, pitchers can be classified as high-fastball guys, or low-fastball guys. Unless you’re Bartolo Colon, you probably don’t want to try your hand at being a down-the-middle-fastball guy, and even a both-sides-of-the-plate-fastball guy like Johnny Cueto shows up as an extreme high-fastballer. High-fastball guys can always throw higher, and low-fastball guys can always throw lower, and last year, the Nationals made an effort toward the extremes.

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The first thing to consider when we think about Hyun-soo Kim’s hitless, OBP-less first 23 at-bats is that it’s 23 at-bats, and it’s Spring Training. Not that everyone hasn’t been considering this all along, but it’s always worth a reminder. Jose Bautista had an 0-for-25 run last year, and those were in games that count, and that wasn’t his first time ever facing major league pitching. It happens. Sometimes, it even happens to the best of them.

Yet, it’s still fair to wonder on this a bit, because this is the first we’ve seen of Kim, meaning it’s all we’ve seen of Kim, and it’s not like dudes are running 0-fers over 23 at-bats all the time — it would’ve been the 12th-longest hitless streak of last year, and the third-longest streak of not having reached base. This was a notable stretch of futility, Spring Training notwithstanding. The past tense being used here, of course, because Kim has snapped the streak. He reached base for the first time this spring after being hit by pitch on Thursday, and later got his first hit — a bases-loaded, RBI single off a Yankees reliever named James Pazos.

Through 25 plate appearances, Kim’s spring slash line is now .042/.080/.042. The hit is the new story, but we can learn more about Kim through the 23 outs. Let’s see.

* * *

Kim observation No. 1: Not all of this is on video

This one actually serves as a double-observation, with the latter half being a reminder that really, none of this too much matters. Proof of that being, not all of it is even televised. It’s 2016. If something matters, you can sit on your couch in your underwear and watch it on television. You can watch plenty that assuredly doesn’t matter, too, so it says something about those events which are consciously not televised. The first few games of Baltimore’s Spring Training weren’t televised, and neither was a select game in the middle. The rest were, though, and I watched 13 of Kim’s 24 hitless plate appearances and took some notes.

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Nothing in this life is certain but death, taxes, and major league baseball players reporting to Spring Training in the best shape of their life, as the old saying goes. That’s how the old saying goes, right? Well, the old saying needs an update. Sorry, Gramps. This ain’t your father’s Spring Training. May I propose: Nothing in this life is certain but death, taxes, and major league baseball players reporting to Spring Training in the best shape of their life and then vowing to use that newfound fitness to become more aggressive on the basepaths in the following year and steal more bases than ever?

A touch lengthy, but consider it proposed.

Every year, players show up to Spring Training and claim that they, as professional athletes who are older now than they’ve ever been before, are suddenly in the best shape of their life. Pro-tip: they aren’t. Turns out, they just as often claim they’re going to steal more bases that year. What’s the pro-tip on that one? We’ll just have to find out.

* * *

2013

Mike Trout

• Claim: “I just go and play my game. But if I get a chance to steal, I’m going to go. I’m going to be more aggressive than last year … Last year there were some chances where I could have gone. This year I’m going to take more chances.”
• Career: 53-58 (91%)
  
• Prior year: 49-54 (91%)
  
• Ensuing year: 33-40 (83%)
  

Trout was his league’s most prolific basestealer in 2012, but it wasn’t enough. The next year, he was going to take more chances. Except he didn’t. He took 14 fewer chances, and did a worse job of taking those chances. Maybe it was because his “main goal” was to “score some runs this year.” He did lead the league in runs.

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I’ll begin by saying I’m not sure what value all of what’s to follow actually has. I know that’s about the least-compelling way to begin a blog post, but I just want that to be very clear. TangoTiger’s recent Building a Better WAR Metric series on the site jumpstarted an idea I’d been kicking around in my head for a while. It’s an idea that mostly exists because I’ve seen people on the internet say they’d want to see something like it, and, at the very least, it could serve as a talking point for another constructive discussion about WAR, and any constructive discussion about WAR is a good thing, because we all admit it’s far from perfect and constructive discussions usher progress.

People don’t really have beef with the offensive side of WAR, I don’t think. As far as sabermetric stats go, wRC+, and therefore wRAA, are about as infallible as they come. Tough to argue with the outcomes of history. I don’t see too many quibbles with the base-running numbers, partially because I think most people think they do a good job, but also because they don’t move the needle much either way, and there’s bigger fish to fry. Some people aren’t fans of the positional adjustments — both the assigned weights, and the entire concept of including them. I’m in the camp that firmly believes in the idea of the positional adjustment, but, like anything, the formula for the weights could always be looked at to see if it could be improved in any way, and Jeff Zimmerman’s work on this topic last offseason was a great place to start.

But the bigger beef, beyond the positional adjustments, is of course defense. Anyone will admit this is the weak link of WAR. It’s probably the weakest link of sabermetrics, as a whole, in 2016. And mostly, what it boils down to is, we know that defensive metrics don’t stabilize until the sample spans roughly three years, or 3,000-ish innings. Meaning, the single-season data is subject to noise, and if we wanted to draw any conclusions from it, we’d have to regress it. Despite that, single-season WAR is powered by noisy, unregressed, single-season defensive metrics. That’s the crux of the beef with WAR.

So, some folks have suggested that the defensive component of WAR ought to be regressed in some way, in an effort to strip out some of the noise that comes with single-year defensive data, or to better capture a defender’s true performance. I think there are a number of flaws in this general line of thinking, but there are a number of flaws with the way it’s being done now, too, so let’s humor one another.

Both ZiPS and Steamer use multiple years of data, giving more weight to the most recent seasons. Multiple years of data to weed out noise? Check. Both also incorporate some form of “scouting” information: Steamer regresses toward the results of the Fans Scouting Report, ZiPS searches for keywords in actual, physical scouting reports and uses those as a means for regression. Eye test? Check. Blend all that together and factor in some aging curves, and you’ve got yourself as good an idea of any player’s true-talent defensive ability as you’re going to find. Sort the Fld column here and I think you’ll agree that these numbers pass the eye test with flying colors.

So let’s imagine a world where, last year, every player performed exactly to their true-talent defensive ability. Everyone hit the same, everyone ran the same, everyone had the same amount of playing time, but defensively, we knew exactly what everyone’s true-talent ability was worth, and no one varied from it.

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12:25

The Dude of NY:

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ORIOLES DISCLAIMER: Signings are not official until announced by the team. Player must still pass physical, which is apparently very difficult.

Maybe I shouldn’t even be writing this. I’ve been burned once before. But I’m going to go ahead and submit to the gambler’s fallacy and say there’s no way another medical snafu happens in Baltimore this offseason. Not after the first two. Not this year!

Baltimore’s exploits in the free-agent market this year, at least with regard to bringing in new players, have been like the construction of the Swamp Castle. The Orioles nearly signed Dexter Fowler to fill their void in right field, but at the last second, that deal sank into the swamp. Then they were linked to Austin Jackson, but that idea burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the third one! The third one stayed up.

Baltimore’s third attempt at building a castle in a swamp is Pedro Alvarez, with whom the team reportedly agreed to terms last night. Those terms are one year and $5.75 million, with another million or two in possible incentive dollars. It’s probably a little more than we’d expect a platoon bat without a position who was non-tendered in December to receive in early March, but when the terms of a deal begin with “one year and…” the money is almost always inconsequential. Alvarez got what he got, and now the Orioles stand to benefit from whatever he can offer them.

But what can Alvarez offer the Orioles? Well, he can offer them oodles of power, of course. If one were to distribute the $5.75 million Alvarez will reportedly earn according to the importance of his tools, north of $5 million would probably be attributed to his power. The power is Alvarez’s entire game, and it comes from the left-hand side, which helps protect Baltimore’s righty-heavy lineup.

And, despite the non-tendering, and the having-to-wait-until March, and the one-year deal, Alvarez’s bat is as there as it’s ever been. You probably wouldn’t guess it based on the inactivity surrounding Alvarez’s market, but, just last year, he tied a career-high in wRC+. He’s striking out less than he used to, and while the uptick in ground balls could be a small cause for concern, last year’s power output was second only to his 2013 season. Alvarez hits. The reason he had no market was because he needs to throw his glove into a swamp, and there just weren’t many designated-hitter openings for him in the American League.

But there’s a catch. With free-agent signings on March 7, there’s almost always a catch. For one, Alvarez can’t hit lefties at all, and so someone like Nolan Reimold or Joey Rickard will still have to take over for Alvarez in most, if not all, of Baltimore’s games against left-handed starters. But more importantly, the catch is that, in a more ideal world, Baltimore’s March 7 signing is an outfielder. In a perfect world, Baltimore would have already acquired a third outfielder by March 7. But we know about Fowler, and we know about Jackson. Alex Rios and Marlon Byrd were still available, and a trade was always an option, and so even after the first two whiffs, the expectation was that Baltimore would add a competent right fielder. Pedro Alvarez is not a competent right fielder. Neither is Mark Trumbo, but he’s the default square peg for Baltimore’s round hole.

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