The Daily Best

Brad Penny – Blanking the Braves for 5 innings while striking out 8 and walking none was enough to give Penny top honors for the day. Between injuries in 2005, he actually had a few scattered performances just like tonight’s. His strikeouts per 9 innings (K/9) made a nice climb out of the gutter towards “good” territory last season, but his walks per 9 innings (BB/9) headed in the wrong direction. This was definitely a good start.
Runners Up: Sergio Mitre, Vincente Padilla

Aaron Boone – Today, Boone was a triple shy of the cycle, which has happened 1,141 other times the past 4 years. He’s actually accomplished this not so rare feat 3 other times, but his 4 hits (previous best 3 hits) made this by far his best “triple shy of the cycle” performance. He’s also batting .556 on the year and is playing well enough to keep his job, for now.
Runners Up: Brad Wilkerson, Richie Sexson

The Daily Worst

Andy Pettitte – Joining one of the many quality pitchers that had rough starts in their first outing, Pettitte was pretty horrible giving up 13 hits and 7 runs in 4 plus innings of work. He’s giving up 7 or more runs 17 times in his career, but he’s never given up more hits per inning. This start is definitely in contention for the worst of his 12 year career.
Runners Up: Tim Wakefield, Freddy Garcia

Jason Bay – With everyone expecting Bay to have a huge season, he is hitless in his first two games. He did walk 3 times in the opener, but he managed to go 0-4 today and do absolutely nothing when he was the tying run in the 8th inning. He grounded into a double player earlier in the game too. Those worrying that he will not be thrown many strikes this year, fear not. He wasn’t thrown that many strikes last year either and did just fine. I don’t expect to see him in this spot again.
Runners Up: Laynce Nix, Jeff Francoeur

Prince Fielder: Contact Watch! – Fielder is now 0-9 with 7 strikeouts.

MLB.com’s Customer Service – I have now been on hold by MLB.com for 77 minutes and 6 seconds. I think I have listened to an entire Mascagni opera which makes me want to dig up my copy of “Raging Bull”. Maybe if I pop it in now, I’ll finish it just in time to actually talk with a representative.

The 5 Players I Feel Like Writing About

Johan Santana – Looks like he’s off to his typical slow start as he gave up 10 hits and 4 runs in 5.2 innings against the Blue Jays. He struck-out just 3 batters and walked 1. Over the past two seasons he’s had a 4.05 ERA the first half, compared to a 1.62 ERA in the second half. The biggest difference being his struggles with the long ball early in the season.

Jim Thome – Two games into the season and the man who hit over 40 home runs for 4 consecutive seasons, already has 2 home runs this year. He’s batting .500 on the season, with no strikeouts. His isolated power (ISO) is way off the chart! Aren’t small sample sizes fun?

Brandon Webb – Pitching at Coors Field yesterday, Webb took his ground ball tendencies to the utter extreme by inducing 21 ground balls and a single fly ball. The only pitcher to have a higher GB:FB ratio in a single game the past 5 seasons is Zach Day. Back on June 6th, 2003, Webb induced a personal high 25 ground balls.

Josh Willingham – Joining Albert Pujols and Chris Shelton in the 2006 multi-homer game club, Willingham is showing why he was touted by many as a “fantasy sleeper”. Going 3-7 in his first two games with just one strikeout isn’t too shabby. In the opener he made contact with every single pitch he swung at. So far, so good.

John Lackey – Being the Lackey fan that I am, I was disappointed to see him have such a poor outing in his season debut. He struggled to keep runners off base in every inning, but despite his 5 earned runs and 9 hits, he still struck out 4 and walked only 1 in 4 innings. He’s been a pretty slow starter the past two years (6.18 ERA in April), so there should be much better days ahead of him.

The Daily Best

Roy Oswalt – It looks like Oswalt is well on his way to his third straight 20 win season as he blanked the young Marlins for 8 innings while striking out 8 and walking one. Now that he’s out of Roger Clemens‘ shadow in Houston, maybe he’ll get a little more attention and maybe even a Cy Young award? Third time’s a charm.
Runners up: Jake Peavy, Jason Jennings

Hideki Matsui – In the 2005 season opener he went 3-5 with 1 HR and 3 RBI’s and this year started off pretty similar. In his 4-4, 1HR, 4 RBI effort he got hits off four of the five different A’s pitchers. Did you know that this was his 2,061 consecutive game if you include the 1,573 games he played in Japan? That’s getting up there and would (but doesn’t) give him the 3rd longest streak.
Runners Up: Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez

The Daily Worst

Barry Zito – This is really a no-brainer. In his shortest outing ever, he managed to give up 7 runs including a grand slam to Alex Rodriguez. I’m not the biggest Zito fan, but let’s chalk this one up to opening day jitters and a total lack of control. On the bright side, there’s no place for his ERA of 47 to go but down.
Runners Up: Jon Leiber, Derek Lowe

Prince Fielder – On his first opening day, Fielder did nothing to help his Rookie of the Year campaign. He went 0-4 striking out in all four of his at-bats. While the odds of him striking out in 100% of his at-bats for the season are slim, it might be a while before he improves on last year’s 28% strikeout rate. The power’s there, but the contact is lacking.
Runners Up: Garrett Anderson, Mark Grudzielanek

The 5 Players I Feel Like Writing About

Jason Jennings – In an odd opening day pitcher’s duel at Coors Field, Jennings held his own against Brandon Webb by going 7 strong innings while striking out 6 and giving up only 1 run. He’s coming back from a broken finger that kept him out most of last season and while it’s a nice story to see him do well, there’s not much in his past to suggest he can continue his opening day success.

Matt Murton – I wrote a glowing Matt Murton Daily Graphing back in February and between batting .400 in spring training and his 3-5 opening day performance, he’s done nothing to shy me away. It was especially nice to see him hit a home run since power’s been the knock on him.

Chris Shelton – I wasn’t so high on Shelton this off-season because of the way he finished out 2005 (and his fairly average plate discipline), but a few more 2 home run games will make me change my mind in a hurry.

Chris Reitsma – How long do you think it will take Bobby Cox to remove Reitsma from the closers role (again). Given a three run lead, he nearly allowed the Dodgers to complete what would have been, a rather mind blowing comeback. Actually, he barely has borderline closer stuff, striking out just over 5 per 9 innings, with only his extremely low walk rate of 1.7 to save him. Only problem is, the Braves don’t exactly have a deep bullpen and cutting Joey Devine didn’t help.

Fernando Rodney – With Todd Jones on the disabled list, Rodney is more than capable of handling closer duties as he proved by pitching a perfect ninth against the Royals (maybe not the best example). He struck out a quality 8.6 per 9 innings last season, but converted only 9 of 14 save chances after taking over the closers role when Kyle Farnsworth was traded to the Braves. He’ll be the guy at least until Jones comes back.

Much to my surprise, FanGraphs actually works with 2006 stats which are now up and available for viewing. There will be some additional site enhancements later this week.

While I’m waiting for the first night of stats to come in, I decided to launch a pet project of mine. You may notice a new section on the site called “News” and then under each player there is now a new tab “Blog News” and potentially two links below the player information.

What this is (should be) are links to blog posts that have information about that particular player. Matching player names with articles is hardly an exact science but I think it does a pretty good job of locating relevant articles about each player. We currently look at 89 blogs and are certainly open to adding frequently updated baseball blogs to the list.

Hopefully this will add a new dynamic to FanGraphs which will be beneficial to everyone. If you have any comments, suggestions, or concerns please feel free to contact me.

After winning the starting center fielding job from Endy Chavez last season in spring training, Ryan Church did a credible job, hitting .287 with 9 home runs in just over 250 at-bats in between various injuries. Unfortunately for Church, his sophomore year and batting .200 this spring apparently wasn’t enough for him to keep the job and was sent back down to the minors in favor of Brandon Watson.

Watson on the other hand was quite horrible in his major league debut, batting .175 with 1 home run in 40 at-bats, which oddly enough, was nearly identical to Church’s rookie season who hit .175 with 1 home run in 63 at-bats. Watson seems to have turned things around this spring by batting .306 with 7 stolen bases in 62 at-bats. Let’s take a closer look at the two and see if the Nationals make the right choice.

In Church, you have a player with not the best plate discipline. He struck out in 26% of his at-bats in 2005 and as you can see, he really just got worse as the season went on which could very well have been injury related. Additionally, he chases pitches out of the strikes 25% of the time which is about 5% above the league average. He did show some decent power even while playing in R.F.K. Stadium, arguably the worst hitters’ park in baseball. Then again he was better at home than on the road, which does seem a bit odd, but it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to see him hitting 20 home runs one of these days.

Watson‘s plate discipline in the majors has actually been a little better than Church’s as he struck out in 20% of his at-bats and chased pitches outside the strike zone only 17% of the time. Watson is obviously much more of a contact hitter and his strikeouts are actually quite high considering he makes contact when he swings the bat 86% of the time. I wouldn’t be surprised to see his strikeout percentage drop a good 5 points if he can adjust to major league pitching.

Baseball America named Watson the “Fastest Baserunner” in the Nationals farm system and if spring training is any indication, it looks like they’re going to let Watson run. He stole 31 bases last season in AAA, and it would seem extremely silly to trade in Church for Watson if you’re not going to utilize his speed. It’s also worth noting that in his short stint in the majors, Watson really beat the ball into the ground with a 53% ground ball percentage. That puts him in Ichiro’s territory, so he’ll really need to run like the wind to beat out those plays at first.

It seems like the Nationals essentially made a tradeoff of power for speed and are assuming that Watson will be able to get on base as much as Church did. This seems unlikely to me and while it will be fun to watch him steal, it seems like an overall poor decision to dismiss Church despite his poor spring. I find this move extremely short sighted and it’s right inline with just about everything that’s happened with the Nationals this off-season.

Between a strained oblique muscle and a season ending strained lat muscle, Rich Harden was excellent in 2005 going 10-5 with a 2.53 ERA in 128 innings. In the off-season he elected to have shoulder surgery on his non throwing arm in order to alleviate many of the minor injuries which were believed to be caused by overcompensation due to his injured left shoulder. So far, the shoulder surgery has been a success since this spring, Harden has pitched 14 innings with a 1.29 ERA while striking out a whopping 19 batters! Let’s take a closer look and see if he’s ready to be a perennial Cy Young contender.

Looking at his strikeouts per 9 innings (K/9), you’ll see that he just falls within the top 20% of all pitchers and actually had the 12th highest K/9 of any starting pitcher for the 2005 season. He has an easy delivery, resulting in a deceptively speedy fastball which topped out at 102 mph last season. His fastball is accompanied by a splitter and slider which batters will chase out of the strike zone a combined 40% of the time. Throw in the fact that batters only make contact with his pitches 75% of the time and when they actually do make contact only put the ball in play 50% of the time and you’ve got yourself one of the most un-hittable pitchers in baseball.

When Harden first entered the league he struggled with his control, but he’s managed to get his walks per 9 innings (BB/9) down to acceptable levels the past two years. There’s still a bit of room for improvement here, but if can continue to strike out batters the way he’s been doing it this spring (K/9 over 12), he’ll do just fine with his current BB/9.

To add to the good news, he’s also a groundball pitcher which is a little rare to find in a pitcher that makes batters struggle to make clean contact with the ball. Obviously this (and playing in McAfee Coliseum) really helps keep his home runs per 9 innings (HR/9) well below the league average.

There’s really nothing not to like about Harden. I may as well be doing a Daily Graphing on Johan Santana (his would be even more glowing). The only thing that could possibly hold him back at this point is injury and hopefully the off-season surgery has helped minimize the chances that his 2005 injuries will re-occur. If all goes well, I’d be surprised not to see him in contention for the A.L. Cy Young award.

As promised, I’ve added HBP, SF, SH, WP, BK, and GDP to the stats pages. HBP and SF has also been added to the OBP formula and HBP has also been added to the LOB% formula. We’ll probably look into using a more complicated version of RC/G too. This was a rather annoying fix, hopefully nothing broke in the process. If you find any errors please let us know. Also, all the graphs have been wiped (200,000 graphs was taking up a lot of disk space).

Quick reminder to all bloggers and anyone wishing to use the graphs in their work. If you want the graphs to be permanent you must save the graph and host it yourself.

I was informed today by Baseball Info Solutions that they will now be tracking “Fliners” which are a new categorization of batted balls. They’ll be breaking down these “Fliners” into two categories for us: Fliner-Fly and Fliner-Liner (that sounds kind of funny). I really like the fact that they are breaking down Fliners into Fly Balls and Line Drives so we’ll still be able to look at Fly Ball/Ground Ball/Line Drive data without Fliners if desired.

So, while I’m here, I may as well give a quick update on what’s coming to FanGraphs this season.

1. Hit by Pitch (HBP) data is on its way. This was an initial oversight, but it should be up this weekend and included in all the stats and graphs where it wasn’t previously included. We’re also going to add SH, SF, WP and BK data (and maybe some other stuff) to the stats pages. This should be available when the Hit by Pitch data goes live.

2. We have made arrangements with Baseball Info Solutions to display raw “pitch data” for retired players! This is currently a work in progress on the programming side of things, but I hope to have the raw data available for each retired player sometime in the next month. We currently only have the 2005 season, but we’ll be receiving 2006 data and are considering the 2004 data.

3. We’ll be trying out a new column called “Speed Plot” which will essentially go through the previous day’s games and point out various performances in an abbreviated Daily Graphing style. Consider it the Daily Graphing lightning round so we can hit on more than one player a day. I’m not sure how it will work out, but we’re going to give it a shot anyway and see what happens.

4. I’ve been slacking a bit on the Daily Graphing column but it should resume being pretty much daily when the regular season starts. We’ll be doing some preliminary Fliner analysis as the 2006 data starts to become significant. Obviously we’ll have to until 2007 to see year-to-year trends.

5. Nightly stat updates will occur between 2am and 5am each night of the regular season. Hopefully everything will go smoothly on the first night, but incase of unforeseen events, we’ll be working round the clock until FanGraphs is working properly with the 2006 data!

We’re very excited about our first full major league season. (I think if FanGraphs were a baseball player, it’d still have rookie status). Hope everyone will find our 2006 offerings useful and insightful, and of course, FanGraphs will remain 100% free.

After hanging around Baseball America’s top 100 prospect list for a couple years, Jeremy Reed, at only 24 years of age played his first full major league season in 2005. Compared to the small preview he gave in his 2004 big league debut where he batted .397 in 58 at-bats, his 2005 season was, to put it nicely, sobering. In just under 500 at-bats he batted only .254 with 3 home runs and 12 stolen bases. Let’s see if there’s any chance an improved 2006 on the horizon.

Looking at his walk to strikeout ratio (BB/K), he actually has very solid plate discipline, especially for someone so young. He swings at pitches outside the strike zone around 17% of the time which is better than the average major league player and makes contact when he swings about 86% of the time. He’s particularly aggressive with curveballs inside the strike zone.

While most everything seems to be in order in terms of plate discipline, his Isolated Power (ISO) leaves much to be desired. It’s a little odd because typically players that have similar plate discipline will hit on average 14 or so home runs which is a far cry from the 3 he actually hit. Playing at SAFECO Field is going to suppress his home runs a bit and his 33 doubles are encouraging, but that still doesn’t explain the discrepancy.

Remember when I said he was aggressive with curveballs inside the strike zone? His batting average on balls in play (BABIP) with those same curveballs was an awful .209 which is part of the reason for his mediocre batting average. Furthermore, his line drive percentage was a mere 18.9% where he struggled not only with breaking pitches but also slightly with fastballs.

I wouldn’t make too much of Jeremy Reed’s batting average and low home run totals in his first full major league season. His plate discipline is solid and I’d venture he improves his power numbers by hitting around 10 home runs next season. Unfortunately, his ground ball tendencies will limit his home run ceiling but hopefully he’ll make the necessary adjustments against breaking balls which would give his batting average a much needed boost.

Remember back in 2003 when Dontrelle Willis won the National League Rookie of the Year award? If it weren’t for a few extra wins, perhaps Brandon Webb would have won the award instead, since his 2.84 ERA, 180 innings, 172 strikeouts and 1.15 WHIP were all better than Willis. Since then, Webb has been quite consistent throwing over 200 innings in his past two seasons with an ERA just under 3.60. He only has 21 wins to show for his effort, but he’s only received an average of 3 runs per start from his offense, so it hardly seems fair to put the blame on Webb’s shoulders.

So far this spring, Webb has been spectacular, going 3-0 while allowing only 1 hit and no runs in 9 innings of work. It’s not exactly a sample size you can hang your hat on (and it’s spring training), but it is a little impressive. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look and see if he’s capable of becoming one of the elite pitchers in the National League.

His strikeouts per 9 innings (K/9) decreased for the second year in a row, falling to an adequate 6.7. That’s nearly a two point drop since his rookie season. In 2005, batters swung at his pitches outside the strike zone 21% of the time, which is slightly above average. Fortunately, his walks per 9 innings (BB/9) plummeted nearly three points to a good 2.3 which easily offset any decrease in strikeouts.

While neither his strikeouts nor walks are off the chart, he induces far and away the most ground balls of any starting pitcher in baseball. He’s led the league in groundball to fly ball ratio the past two seasons and his rookie year he was second only to Derek Lowe. The most successfully pitcher that’s even close to being in the same league as him in terms of ground balls is Roy Halladay who also has a K/9 in the high 6’s. Webb however, has lacked Halladay’s pinpoint control.

It’s also worth mentioning that while Webb’s home runs per 9 innings (HR/9) have always been pretty good due to his extreme groundball tendencies, he has a very high home runs-per-fly ball (HR/FB) of 18.9%. While it’s not unusual for groundball pitchers to have a higher HR/FB, I’d consider 18.9% freakishly high, so expect there to be some improvement in the home runs department.

It’s rare to find an extreme groundball pitcher that can also strike batters out and Webb definitely falls into that category. Sure his strikeouts may have dipped a bit, but his control is much improved and he’s apparently added a cut fastball which is supposed to make him a bit less predictable with his sinker. If that helps him strike out a few more batters, he should be primed for an excellent year.