Since Voros McCracken pondered the meaning of BABIP back in 2001, much of sabermetric research has had an increased focus on volatility. This is especially important when you run projections — as I do from time to time when the mood strikes me — since that volatility has a way of confounding your prognostications. While the evidence suggests that hitters have much more of an actual BABIP “ability” than pitchers do, it doesn’t mean that such an ability is on the same firm ground as, say, plate discipline or the ability to crush the ball into an alternate universe. Even still, outliers tell us a lot even if we expect some of those outliers to remain outliers to some degree.

As odd as it still seems, we’re essentially at the halfway point of the 2020 season for most teams. Weird BABIP numbers don’t magically just work themselves out in a normal 162-game schedule, so we would expect them to do so even less when the season is only 60 games. In a situation like this, estimates of what BABIP a player “should” have based on their advanced data will have more relevance to future seasons than the actual BABIPs do.

One feature built into ZiPS — and into the next iteration of the in-season model — are “z” stats, ZiPS’ attempt to make sense of volatile numbers. For stats like pitcher homers, zHR is far more predictive than the actual number of home runs allowed is (the most predictive model using just HR and zHR weighs the latter about nine times that of the former). zBABIP for hitters isn’t quite on the same level, with an r-squared of only 0.54 historically, but it does still add a lot of information about which players exceeding or falling short of typical BABIP numbers “deserve” to do so. Read the rest of this entry »

12:04

Dan Szymborski: And welcome to the last SzymChat of August and the first-half of the season?

12:04

Dan Szymborski: “half” lol

12:06

Dan Szymborski: I think they’re a good team! The highs are very good. There’s a lot to like in the starting lineup except for RF

12:06

Dan Szymborski: EE still could get going

12:06

Dan Szymborski: And Danny Medwick has made things interesting!

Read the rest of this entry »

Back before the Chicago Cubs decided to go full-on Ebenezer Scrooge, they aggressively pursued top players in free agency to improve their roster. One of those players was Yu Darvish, an ace for the Rangers and Dodgers after seven years of dominating the Japan Pacific League, a feat he accomplished while still a teenager. Darvish was the best pitcher available after the 2017 season and the Cubs signed him to a six-year, $126 million contract, a sum commensurate with his abilities. And unlike his first deal in the majors, Darvish didn’t have to contend with a posting fee; when the right-hander came to the States, the Nippon Ham Fighters got nearly as much ($51.7 million) as he did ($56 million).

The initial returns were not promising. The Cubs won 95 games in 2018 before being bounced in the Wild Card game by the Colorado Rockies, while triceps and elbow issues limited Darvish to just eight games. Those were mostly ineffective games to boot, as his walk rate jumped to career highs, his ERA and FIP ballooned to near five, and he failed to complete the fifth inning in five of his starts. MRIs revealed no structural damage to his arm, but the team was careful; the triceps is important in the arm deceleration phase of a pitcher’s delivery:

Activity of the triceps muscles, as well as activity of the anconeus and wrist flexor muscles, helped the joint’s ligaments apply a compression force during this phase in order to stabilize the elbow and prevent elbow distraction.

Darvish was already a veteran of one Tommy John surgery and the Cubs were rightly conservative about rushing their ace to full-time duty. The first victory of 2019 was just staying healthy, which he achieved; Darvish only missed a single start down the stretch due to forearm pain. But the control wasn’t there in the early-going and a third of the way through the season, his ERA was at 5.40 with an extremely worrying 38 walks in 11 starts. Indeed, even late as Independence Day, Darvish’s ERA was north of five. Read the rest of this entry »

The Houston Astros took another hit Wednesday afternoon with the news that young slugger Yordan Alvarez, last year’s unanimous American League Rookie of the Year, would miss the rest of the 2020 season due to knee surgery. For the Astros, winners of 107 games in 2019, it represents the latest downgrade to the roster that was just one win away from winning the World Series last October. For Alvarez, it means a lot of pain, physical therapy, and a lost opportunity to consolidate some of his phenomenal gains as an offensive force over the previous 18 months.

Yordan Alvarez is going to undergo surgery next week to repair a partial tear of patella tendon in right knee and is out for the year, Baker said.

— Brian McTaggart (@brianmctaggart) August 19, 2020

Knee problems are sadly not new for Alvarez; even in March, there was a very real chance that he’d miss what was then Opening Day due to his knees. His bread-and-butter will always be making baseballs travel a very long distance, but he’s also surprisingly quick for a man his size. Despite what the massive slugger trope suggests, Alvarez’s sprint speed during his rookie season was measured by Statcast as 26.8 feet per second, just below the league average of 27. That burst of agility is rightly not used to steal bases, but it was enough to give the Astros the flexibility to occasionally use him in the outfield.

The hope had been that the season’s start date being pushed back from late March to late July would allow sufficient time for Alvarez to heal from his knee problems. But further complicating matters was a case of COVID-19, officially revealed last Friday after a couple weeks of the usual-for-2020 speculation surrounding a player missing time due to “undisclosed” reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

12:04

Dan Szymborski: This is a chat.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Well, ZiPS is not a scout and it’s going to be skeptical of most college players.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Until they do stuff in the minors.

12:06

Dan Szymborski: And it wasn’t particularly enthralled by his minor league performance, which was largely walk-driven.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you follow baseball, you might be aware of the minor scandal “caused” by Fernando Tatis Jr. on Monday night. Without the usual tens of thousands of fans in attendance to serve as direct witnesses, Tatis brazenly and maliciously hit a grand slam of Texas Rangers pitcher Juan Nicasio on a 3-0 count, while fully aware that his team had a seven-run lead. Ian Gibaut then came in and threw behind Manny Machado, sending an important message that acts of baseball will not be tolerated! Despite Chris Woodward’s efforts to explain Tatis’ violations of baseball’s sanctified unwritten rules, MLB had the temerity to give suspensions to Woodward and Gibaut. Rob Manfred may as well have thrown mom’s apple pie off the window sill.

More of this, please.

Baseball’s unwritten rules are a dreary mess, a veteran-imposed caste system of arbitrary rules and penalties that attempt to impose conformity, often on players of color, without the slightest benefit to how the game is played on the field or how the product comes across to viewers. And in addition to being tone-deaf and nonsensical, they’re rarely consistently enforced! I certainly don’t remember Woodward issuing a heartfelt apology to the Royals last year when his team hit two home runs in the ninth against Chris Owings, dragooned into mop-up duty in a long-lost game. At least Nicasio is an actual major league pitcher.

But enough about that fussiness — let’s get back to the baseball-related awesomeness of Tatis.

Tatis isn’t going to be the highest-paid Padre for a very long time thanks to the presence of Machado, but if the next decade of San Diego baseball is successful, it will be defined by players like the young shortstop, not to mention Chris Paddack and MacKenzie Gore. The resurgent, seemingly fly ballism-converted Eric Hosmer is in his decline phase and Machado, while a special player, didn’t grow up in the organization. Read the rest of this entry »

I’d be a liar if I said the Los Angeles Dodgers are struggling. At 16-7, they have been as dangerous as expected and currently hold the best record in the National League while leading in both runs scored and ERA. But the offense still isn’t firing on all cylinders, with Cody Bellinger, Max Muncy, and Joc Pederson all off to fairly slow starts. This is an especially concerning development for Bellinger given that he was responsible for approximately eight wins in 2019, hitting .305/.406/.629 with a 162 wRC+ and 47 homers while besting Christian Yelich for the NL MVP award.

Outside of hitting a couple home runs against the Angels on Friday, Bellinger’s 2020 has been his most forgettable campaign in the majors. A triple-slash of .187/.245/.341 (57 wRC+) has left him hovering around replacement level, and in a 60-game season, we’re only a week away from the halfway point.

Baseball is a game of adjustments, and even during an MVP campaign last year, Bellinger found pitchers adjusting to him with (slightly) successful results. On the morning of June 1, 2019, Bellinger’s OPS stood at an awe-inspiring 1.208; his batting average had fallen below the .400 line just a week before. You wouldn’t call the .262/.372/.561 (136 wRC+) he hit over the rest of the season an actual problem, but it was distinctly below his early-season standards. It wasn’t a complete sea change, but pitchers gradually started throwing him more breaking pitches as 2019 progressed, a trend that has continued in 2020. When Bellinger surged in April and May of last year, only 20.9% of his pitches were breaking pitches, a number which increased to 25.6% from June to September and to 28.7% in 2020, passing the 30% line so far in August.

And pitchers haven’t yet been punished for this approach. Bellinger has swung at 51.6% of all breaking pitches in 2020, compared to 34.2% in April/May 2019 and 41.9% from June on. Swinging at more breaking pitches has resulted in fewer hits than before; after getting 14 hits against the bendy stuff in April/May, including five homers, he only managed 16 over the next four months and he has just two in 2020. Since June 1, 2019 in 122 games, Bellinger has just two hits against curveballs, with none coming in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

When people get excited about the Rule 5 draft at the Winter Meetings, Johan Santana is one of the biggest reasons why. Roberto Clemente is almost certainly the best player ever taken in this event, but Santana leads a healthy spoonful of All-Stars who found new teams when their old ones couldn’t find the roster spot (this list also includes names such as Bobby Bonilla, George Bell, Josh Hamilton, and Shane Victorino). It took another trade to get Santana to the club for which he’d achieve his greatest exploits, the Minnesota Twins. After receiving Cy Young votes in six consecutive seasons and winning two trophies, injuries quickly ended Santana’s career before he reached his mid-30s.

The Twins weren’t even the team that launched Santana to stardom, though they certainly received a benefit from the Rule 5 draft. Knowing the Marlins wanted Jared Camp, the Twins took him in the 1999 Rule 5, only to instantly trade him to the Marlins for Santana and $500,000. Santana certainly wasn’t a finished product at this point and struggled in a mop-up role for Minnesota in his rookie season. His 2002 campaign didn’t go much better, as he was raw and didn’t have a true out pitch to punch out batters, and he missed significant time due to an elbow injury.

Santana was never a star on the radar gun, and at this point, a less determined team may have simply been happy to move on with the half a million bucks they pocketed. But the Twins persisted, and while converting Santana to a starting pitching role in the minors in 2002, former Ranger reliever Bobby Cuellar worked with Santana on refining his changeup and making it the centerpiece of his repertoire.

Santana fiddled with a changeup before 2002, but that was when the pitch blossomed. After Minnesota sent Santana to Class AAA Edmonton to convert him from a reliever to a starter, Bobby Cuellar, the pitching coach there, preached about the significance of trusting his changeup in any situation.

During bullpen sessions, Cuellar would tell Santana to imagine the count was 2-0 or 3-0 and would instruct him to throw a changeup. During games, Cuellar sometimes had Santana toss seven straight changeups. Although Santana said it took months to be that bold, Cuellar said he saw “a little glow in Johan’s eye” as the pitch developed. By July 2003, Santana was in the Twins’ rotation. By 2004, he was a 20-game winner.

Santana’s control was yet to reach the levels it would during his prime, but his change quickly became a weapon. From an overall run value standpoint, his changeup ranked 14th in baseball in 2002 and 17th in 2003. Coincidentally, his first Cy Young vote came in 2003. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Hello chatters and chatees

12:03

Dan Szymborski: EVER? True.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: After facing his curve and change, Hendricks fastballs look like Jordan Hicks

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Well, Jordan Hicks fastballs. They don’t actually look like Jordan Hicks

Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds haven’t yet had the breakout season than many — myself included — predicted, but one player who need not shoulder any of the blame for their 8-9 start is Trevor Bauer. His first three outings hint at a repeat of his 2018 All-Star season, and he seems to be on more solid ground than he was back then.

But let’s go back. In one of the more surprising moves of the 2019 trade deadline, the fourth-place Reds (49-56) decided to flip the usual script for teams in their position. The result was a three-way trade with the Padres and Indians that brought Bauer to Cincinnati for Taylor Trammell, Yasiel Puig, and Scott Moss.

The initial returns were…not great. In 10 starts with Cincinnati in 2019, Bauer posted a 6.39 ERA with 12 homers allowed in 56.1 innings. His 4.85 FIP told a more positive tale, but even that mark was well below the team’s expectations. But the Bauer trade was never about 2019. The NL Central didn’t appear to have any juggernauts looming and the potential benefits of having Trammell on the roster were years away; a pitcher like Bauer, meanwhile, could have a meaningful effect on a pennant race now. Bringing in the often-controversial pitcher was always about the 2020 season, and Bauer’s first three starts have been nearly spotless. Read the rest of this entry »