Jedd Gyorko is ready to take over as San Diego’s regular second baseman. He’s also prepared to fill in at third base, the position he’s played since being taken in the second round of the 2010 draft. With Chase Headley now on the disabled list, Gyorko (pronounced JER-ko) could play one of the positions on opening day.

Gyorko can swing the bat: The 24-year-old right-handed hitter went .311/.373/.547 with 30 home runs last year between Double-A San Antonio and Triple-A Tucson. One of the top prospects in a loaded Padres system, he will contend for National League Rookie of the Year honors if he plays to his capabilities.

Gyorko addressed his development — on both sides of the ball — prior to Wednesday‘s game at the Peoria Sports Complex. Also weighing in were manager Bud Black and hitting coach Phil Plantier.

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THE DEFENSE:

David Laurila: When were you first approached about playing second base?

Jedd Gyorko: Josh Byrnes called me as I was heading into the offseason. He said he wanted me to start getting some balls at second base and that it would probably be the position I’d be playing when I came to spring training. It was good to know that early so I could get in a full offseason of second base. I actually played there one year in college, so it’s not completely foreign to me.

DL: Did you have any issues with the move?

JG: I don’t think it would have mattered what I said, really. Read the rest of this entry »

Six years ago, Drew Stubbs was a highly regarded Cincinnati Reds prospect about to play his first full professional season. He’s still looking to fulfill his potential. It’s happening with a new team, at a new position. The Cleveland Indians have moved the 28-year-old speedster to right field to make room in center for Michael Bourn.

Stubbs has struggled at the plate. In three-plus seasons his slash line is .241/.312/.386. He’s hit 59 home runs but has struck out 588 times in 2,004 plate appearances. In the eyes of many Reds fans, he should have taken fewer pitches, cut down on his swing and bunted more often.

The University of Texas product first talked to me about his game during an interview for Baseball America, in March 2007. This weekend, he addressed many of the same topics.

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David Laurila: We first talked in 2007. Has your career gone as expected?

Drew Stubbs: At that time, my goal was to make it to the big leagues and have a career. Now that I’m here and have a few years under my belt, I can only look to continue to get better. I don’t think I’ve tapped into the full potential of what I can do at this level. Hopefully I’ll keep coming along.

DL: You said your game was based on speed. Is that still the case?

DS: Speed is something I’m blessed to have and a lot of players aren’t. Whether it’s playing the outfield or running the bases, it is something you can’t coach or teach, so I try to use it to my advantage.

DL: Some people in Cincinnati feel you didn’t take enough advantage of your speed. Is that a fair criticism? Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Dempster has never been a flamethrower. Nor has he been an ace. What he’s been is Old Mr. Reliable, consistently logging innings and double-digit win totals. The 35-year-old right-hander comes into the current season — his first with the Red Sox — with a career mark of 124-124 and a league-average ERA-. Originally with the Marlins, he had his best seasons with the Cubs and has also pitched for the Reds and Rangers.

Dempster talked about the evolution of his repertoire, and the importance of command, last week in Fort Myers.

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David Laurila: How much have you evolved over the course of your career?

Ryan Dempster: As you go along, you make adjustments. When you’re younger, you think you can just throw everything by a hitter. You try throwing the ball harder. When you get older, you realize the value of changing speeds and putting the ball where you need to put it. From an approach standpoint, that’s probably what has changed the most.

DL: How hard did you throw when you first signed?

RD: Not much harder than I throw now. I threw a little harder when I was closing, but as a starter I’ve always been kind of around the same.

DL; How much has your repertoire changed over the years?

RD: Now I throw a split-finger fastball. I didn’t throw that until 2005ish, and didn’t really start throwing it a lot until 2008. It’s a different kind of split. It’s not a traditional forkball, but rather more of a split-type changeup. Fergie Jenkins showed it to me. I threw it in the bullpen in the back fields of HoHoKam Park and it ended up working for me. It’s been a good pitch.

DL: How would you describe the grip? Read the rest of this entry »

Vance Worley will be displaying his uniquely-diverse repertoire in the Twin Cities this summer. Ditto his deception. Acquired by Minnesota from the Phillies in the Ben Revere deal, the 25-year-old right-hander throws six different pitches. They include a four-seam fastball that acts like a cutter and a cutter that acts like a slider. His delivery has produced a k-swing% markedly lower than league average each of the past two seasons.

Worley talked about his repertoire last week in Fort Myers.

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David Laurila: How do you get hitters out?

Vance Worley: For me, it’s about setting pitches up. It’s being able to go inside, back out, up in the zone, bounce a pitch when you need to. Get guys guessing.

DL: Is velocity important to your game?

VW: It can be, but it’s more just flashing it. You don’t have to throw everything 100 percent. Some guys call it a BP fastball. You throw it with command more than velocity. At times you’ll show a hitter something, then come back and throw something harder.

For some reason, on my first pitch of the game, I can never throw anything over 87 mph. It doesn’t matter how hard I try. But I’m usually somewhere between 86 to 93, maybe 94.

DL: Do you throw a two-seamer or four-seamer?

VW: Both, and I have command of both. Whatever is working better is what I’m probably going to throw more. I had a two-seam before I got drafted, but at the lower levels of the minor leagues they wanted me to focus more on four-seamers. I did that until I realized my four-seam was straight. If a ball is straight it’s going to get hit, so I went back to knowing what I knew how to do. That was to throw more sinkers.

DL: You’ve had a low home run rate. Is that mostly a matter of location?

VW: Not necessarily. Read the rest of this entry »

Sig Mejdal is part of the brave new world of Houston Astros baseball. That world — at least as it pertains to the decision-making process — revolves around statistical analysis. Along with general manager Jeff Luhnow, Mejdal helps lead what has become one of most progressive front offices in baseball.

Formerly with the St. Louis Cardinals — along with Luhnow — Mejdal has a pair of engineering degrees — as well as advanced degrees in operations research and cognitive psychology/human factors. He talked about the Astros saber-savvy approach this month during the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

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David Laurila: Your title is “director of decision sciences.” That’s unique within baseball.

Sig Mejdal: Yes, that’s one way of putting it. I believe one writer called it pretentious. To be fair, it is an unusual title, and it’s a first in the industry. Still, given exactly what we do, I think it is an appropriate title. “Decision sciences” involves identifying the attributes that lead to an understanding of the expectancies and variabilities relevant to a particular decision. In short, maximizing your output in an uncertain world. That’s our job: Creating decision aids based on the analysis in order to assist our decision makers.

DL: What has Jeff Luhnow brought to the Astros?

SM: In my opinion, it is not only Jeff, but the owner, Jim Crane, and the President, George Postolos, who have created a special culture here. It is a culture of innovation – where there is an incessant desire to explore, to improve and to do the best that we can. Read the rest of this entry »

Farhan Zaidi isn’t the most famous member of the Oakland A’s front office — that would be Billy Beane — but he might be the smartest. Currently in his fifth year as the club’s Director of Baseball Operations, Zaidi has a Ph.D in economics from the Cal Berkeley. He also has a job description befitting the A’s Moneyball reputation. According to his bio, his primary responsibilities include “providing statistical analysis for evaluating and targeting players,” and “analyzing data from advance scouting reports.”

Zaidi talked about his team’s saber-slanted approach to roster construction between presentations at last weekend’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

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Zaidi on the value of taking risks: “If you’re a small or mid-market team, you’re compelled to engage in a high-variance strategy. We don’t want to just run our operation the same way everyone else does, with the same blend of stats and scouting, In some sense, the optimal strategy is to take risks. We make trades that might be perceived as risky. Sometimes they pay off, like Josh Reddick. Sometimes we acquire guys it turns out we were wrong about.

“If there isn’t some residual between how you evaluate players and how other teams evaluate them, then you’re just using industry values to put together the second-lowest payroll team in the league, and likely end up being the second-worst team. You kind of have to take those risks to outperform your payroll. Sometimes it’s going to backfire, just because you have to try to do something different.

“If I was the Yankees, that wouldn’t be my strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference included a number of Evolution of Sport presentations. Among the best was a study of BABIP factors titled “Hitting ‘Em Where They Are,” by Dan Rosenheck. He is the sports editor of The Economist and a writer for The New York Times’s Keeping Score column on sports statistics, and he gave an overview of his study prior to presenting it on Day Two of the conference.

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Dan Rosenheck: “It was a great surprise to find out that one of the distinguished presenters on the Baseball Analytics panel was Voros McCracken. His discovery, in 1999, was that BABIP allowed by starting pitchers is, at the very least, extremely noisy and hard to predict from year to year. It was a revolution in sabermetrics and opened the door to a vast amount of research. It changed the way many of us understand the game.

“The BABIP question has been the Great White Whale of the sabermetric enterprise. It is the mystery that, 14 years later, has continued to defy the best efforts of quantitative analysts using public available data. Tom Tango’s FIP assumes that all pitchers have exactly league-average BABIP ability. Even a small increase in predictive ability of that question leads to a huge increase in the accuracy with which you can predict how valuable players will be.

“I studied a bunch of variables I thought might have something to do with hit suppression on balls in play. I came up with two — both FanGraphs stats — that seem to have significant predictive power. The first is pop up rate. The second is z-contact, which is when batters swing at a strike — balls in the strike zone — thrown by a pitcher. What percent of those times does the batter make contact? It turns out that, just like inducing pop ups, it reduces BABIP and correlates consistently year to year. Getting batters to swing and miss at your strikes has strong predictive power on hit suppression.

“I came up with a simple model with two curved fits, using data from 2005-2011, with an R-squared of .15. It accounted for 15 percent of the variance in BABIP for starting pitchers relative to rest of that team’s starting rotation. That factors out for defense and ballpark.

“Fifteen percent might not sound like a lot, and the data is noisy, but it’s a lot relative to zero, which is what FIP will tell you. This little equation correctly identifies every single major BABIP outlier of the last decade. If you look at its leader boards, the guys who most often appear as being projected to have the lowest BABIPs relative to their team, using only data from prior seasons — no cheating — it is Tim Wakefield, Ted Lilly, Barry Zito, Johan Santana, Matt Cain. It is the famous exceptions, one right after the other, after the other.

“The second thing is that it works out of sample. I calculated this equation in March 2012 on data from 2005-2011, and when I applied it to the 2012 season, the R-squared actually went up. It predicted the out-of-sample data even better than the in-sample data. There’s no over-fitting, no cheating or spurious relationships. This is real.

“The third thing that works well is you could have a 15 percent R-squared with a very narrow range of predictions. Let’s say you have the best guy at five points below his teammates and the worst at five points above. That might marginally improve your forecast, but it’s not game changing. This equation gets the magnitudes right. It can forecast very big outliers. The guys who have the lowest BABIPs — Chris Young when he was with the Padres, Jered Weaver now, some of the Ted Lilly seasons — it’s projecting these guys for 30, 40 points of BABIP below their teammates. Huge magnitudes, far and above what you would see in any of the standard projection systems like ZIPS, Steamer or PECOTA. I don’t think any of them are projecting anything close to 40 points of differential. And it’s getting them right.

“The reason the R-squared went up last year is that it made a very bold prediction that Jered Weaver was going to have a BABIP over 40 points lower than his teammates. It got it right to .001 of accuracy. That’s lucky, and just one great prediction, but overall it’s not just improving your accuracy at the margins. It’s identifying big outliers to a big degree.

“I will post my data online, so if anyone wants to poke holes in it, all the better for our understanding of this troublesome phenomenon. I think the best avenue for future research is looking at this equation — at basically the favorite and least favorite pitchers — and asking, ‘What do they have in common?’ The guys who have high pop up rates and low z-contact rates are the guys projected to be good hit suppressors, so what do they throw? How hard do they throw? Are they deceptive? And vice versa for the pitchers the equation doesn’t like.

“I had two hypotheses. I thought tall pitchers, like Young and Weaver, might be good at this. I also thought guys who throw a lot of changeups might be good at this. Cole Hamels and Johan Santana come up very high and they’re great changeup artists. But, in fact, the height and changeup percentage in my high and low BABIP samples were identical.

“I don’t have any piercing insights as to what the guys who are good at this are doing to be good at this. Fortunately, the data is available to everybody and the internet has plenty of smart people who can move our understanding of this issue even farther forward.”

The SABR Analytics Conference has stolen some of its luster, but the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference remains an important event for the sabermetrics community. The seventh annual took place this past weekend, in Boston, and featured a plethora of thought-leaders. The Baseball Analytics panel included Ben Jedlovic, Jonah Keri, Voros McCracken, Joe Posnanski and Farhan Zaidi. Other speakers included Mark Cuban, Michael Lewis, Sig Mejdal, Dan Rosenheck and Nate Silver.

Several of them took the time to answer questions between presentations. This installment includes conversations with Cuban, Jedlovic and McCracken. Later in the week we’ll hear from Mejdal, Rosenheck and Zaidi.

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Read the rest of this entry »

Zack Wheeler hadn’t been pitching particularly well when he agreed to do this interview late last season. During his previous seven outings — three with Double-A Binghamton and four with Triple-A Buffalo — he’d allowed 28 runs in 35 innings. Deep into his second full professional season, the New York Mets’ best prospect seemed to have hit a wall.

This season, the 23-year-old right-hander promises to knock down a different wall — the one standing between him and big-league stardom. Few pitching prospects have a higher ceiling. Wheeler throws four plus-pitches, including a mid-90s fastball and a rapidly improving changeup.

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Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Pacheco proved last season that he belongs in the big leagues. In his first full year with the Colorado Rockies, he hit .309/.341/.421, with 32 doubles and five home runs. He appeared in 82 games as a third baseman, 43 at as a first baseman, and five as a catcher.

This year he is in spring training with his future in limbo. Todd Helton and Chris Nelson are tentatively slated to man the infield corners, and fellow 2012 rookie Wilin Rosario is behind the plate. The 27-year-old Pacheco has value, but whether he will be a starter or utility player is unclear.

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David Laurila: Did you establish yourself as a big leaguer last year?

Jordan Pacheco: Not at all. I don’t think one season does that. I think it helps you for the next year, at least as far as not putting a lot of pressure on yourself. When you first come up, you have a lot to prove. That said, I probably have even more to prove now. I have to show I can do it again, year in and year out. I have to go out and earn a roster spot.

DL: You’ve changed positioned since entering pro ball. Has that held you back?

JP: I don’t think so. I was drafted as a middle infielder and they moved me to catcher, but I’ve been catching for four years. I don’t think it held me back at all. I just think getting to the big leagues is a lot of luck. You have to be in the right place at the right time, and when you get that opportunity, you have to take advantage of it.

DL: How did you go from middle infielder to catcher? Read the rest of this entry »