| 9:00 |
: Hello friends
|
| 9:01 |
: Welcome to baseball chat
|
| 9:01 |
: Uncharacteristically on time this week!
|
| 9:01 |
: Don’t get used to it
|
| 9:01 |
: You sell your house to bet on baseball: which team do you bet on to win the AL pennant?
|
| 9:01 |
: Red Sox
|
There’s been sort of a will-they/won’t-they thing going on with Arizona this offseason. They’re the team that probably makes the most sense for free agent Howie Kendrick. Kendrick is a second baseman, the Diamondbacks could arguably use a second baseman, and the front office there has made it clear they want to win in the season ahead. So, Kendrick would make them better, and I think they realize that, but there are these hurdles. There’s only so much money left to spend, and Dave Stewart has voiced a reluctance to give up another draft pick (currently slotted at No. 39).
Even now, Kendrick still fits. A strong market hasn’t developed, at least not publicly, and Arizona still has that potential infield hole. Though it’s noble to want to keep your draft picks, the 39th pick isn’t worth nearly as much as a higher one, so that shouldn’t be a major stumbling block. Kendrick might therefore end up remaining in the National League West, but he isn’t the only available possibility. In fact, you could argue Ian Desmond fits even better.
There’s no hiding from it — baseballs in the major leagues are being pitched faster than ever before, on average. I mean, we don’t have all that much of a record, but the trend is blatantly obvious over the past 10 or 15 years, and it stands to reason it extends ever back. A few years ago, this was a really interesting observation. Now, it’s something everyone already knows. Pitchers throw harder than they used to. That’s a given. Seemingly every bullpen now has an arm or three who would’ve been a certified flamethrower a decade ago.
Why is this happening? It’s important to try to understand the reasons. There are a lot of ideas out there, many of them valid. There’s a belief that, in general, teams are increasingly obsessed with velocity. And bullpens are being used more aggressively, with relievers throwing harder than starters. Newer training techniques are getting more out of young pitchers, so pitchers also just arrive throwing harder. You’ve got teenagers throwing harder, and teams looking for powerful arms and promising bodies — as a consequence, between 2002 – 2004, rookie starters threw their fastballs a hair under 90. The last three years, that average has gone up to 92. Why the increased velocity? “Youth” is a common response.
It’s definitely a big part of the answer. It’s not all of it. I think there’s something else happening, and it can allow us to link a number of this offseason’s free agents.
No team has more conspicuously made us look silly than the Royals. Not in the last few years, for all the reasons you already know. Not many things more visible than consecutive trips to the World Series, and when you look at what the Royals did against what the Royals were expected to do, statistically, it’s natural to wonder what’s up. It’s normal to find comments like this one, left earlier today:
Dave, if the Royals once again reach the post season, or even the world series, is it time to re-calibrate the predictive model? In other words weight some of the production measures differently? 4 years in a row isn’t luck.
For some, “projection” is a dirty word, and for others there’s just a certain skepticism. The Royals are the “face” of this feeling, if that makes any sense, because after all, they’re the defending champs, and they were projected to not be very good. There’s absolutely no question the Royals have exceeded statistical expectations the last few years. What might surprise you is another team has done that even more.
Here’s a graph posted at Baseball Prospectus a week ago:
You see, for each of the last six years, an estimate of Jonathan Lucroy’s pitch-framing value. Now, there are freely available pitch-framing numbers you can browse through at StatCorner. Those will give you a good sense, but the numbers at Baseball Prospectus are the gold standard, with countless variables and adjustments, and what we observe when we look at Lucroy on Baseball Prospectus is that, statistically, it seems like his pitch-receiving has dropped almost all the way to league average. It was only a few years ago he ranked as one of the best, if not the best, so this is fairly astonishing. And Lucroy is said to be on the market, so this is also relevant. What are we supposed to believe as far as Lucroy and pitch-receiving go?
Sometimes I’ll write a post I know is going to be popular. Like, some weeks back, I wrote about how the Cubs seem like the best team in baseball, and that was obviously going to be big. Sometimes the popularity of a post takes me by surprise. A good example would be when I wrote over the summer about Ryan Goins taking pitches and hitting other pitches hard. And then there are the posts almost exclusively for the nerds. For the nerdiest of the nerds. For the people who love thinking about baseball simply for the exercise. This is one of those. Nothing contained here is all that important, but this is the stuff I find most interesting, and I touched on this briefly last night when writing about Justin Upton on the Tigers. The Tigers play half the time in Comerica Park, and Comerica Park suppresses strikeouts.
I’ve written about some of these weird park factors before. The obvious park factors don’t require much explanation. It’s easy to see why there are more homers in Colorado. It’s easy to see why there are more triples in San Francisco. It’s confusing, though, to think about why some environments might increase or decrease strikeouts or walks. It feels like those things should happen independent of the ballpark, and the effects tend not to be huge, but effects do exist in some places. Detroit is one of them. People always ask how these factors can be. It’s never easy to know for sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a conversation.
The first of them cracked. Justin Upton and Yoenis Cespedes remained on the free-agent market, and all around the league, teams indicated they didn’t want to make the necessary commitments. The players wanted five or six or seven years. The teams wanted to give one or two or three. It was enough to make you think there could maybe be a potential bargain, but the market just doesn’t turn out like that. More often than not, a team gives in, and few should be surprised the team that gave in Monday was the Tigers. As always, all Mike Ilitch wants is to win. He’ll now get to watch his team try to win with Upton every day in left field.
The agreement is for six years and a little over $130 million, with Upton also having the opportunity to opt out two years in. That’ll give Upton the chance to hit the market again at the same age that Cespedes is now, and as we’ve written so many times, the opt-out clause has good value to the player. But at the same time, this is the Tigers — Ilitch’s Tigers. On one hand, Ilitch makes these analyses complicated. On the other hand, you could argue they couldn’t be simpler. Upton’s a good player. Ilitch was willing to pay for a good player.
To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t think about park factors very much anymore. Obviously, they matter as much as ever, but you just encounter them less since so many advanced numbers automatically fold them in. They go somewhat unseen, but they’re important, and I was recently reminded that three years ago, Petco Park and Safeco Field debuted new dimensions. There are other factors that affect how stadiums play, like weather patterns and nearby construction, but what’s most important tends to be the shape of a given field itself. So now that we have a good amount of data, let’s see how Petco and Safeco have played more recently.
To be straight, what follows isn’t very rigorous. I didn’t make adjustments or regressions, and almost anyone would tell you that the ideal involves more than three years of information. There are ways to do this more precisely. But, three years are three years, and it shouldn’t be hard to observe any significant changes. Off we go!
At the kind of money he wanted, Chris Davis basically had a one-team market. Other big-spending teams didn’t have openings at first base, and other big-spending teams weren’t buying Scott Boras’ pitch of Davis as a versatile could-be outfielder. The Orioles sensed even a month ago they would be bidding against themselves, and they attempted a couple leverage plays to try to force Boras’ hand. Yet Boras won, as he almost always does. Here’s what’s being reported: Davis re-signed with Baltimore for a seven-year deal worth $161 million. Somehow, the commitment got bigger from what was reported weeks back. The Orioles were the only team around $150 million, and Scott Boras got them to add on more.
That makes it kind of a bad look for Baltimore. The easy takeaway is that Peter Angelos just got played. And at the end of the day, it’s highly unlikely another team would’ve been willing to come close to this, had the Orioles walked away. But for one thing — however much this is worth — this does send a good message that the Orioles will spend to keep good players around. People have doubted that in the past, and now Davis joins Darren O’Day as a returning key player. And there are other factors, as well, in support of the idea this isn’t a certain catastrophe. This isn’t quite a straight-up $161-million commitment. There are, let’s say, special considerations.
Let’s face it — there’s no way not to feel uncomfortable about the Chris Davis sweepstakes.
I’m not just referring to how the Orioles and Davis seem to be at something of an impasse. I’m not just referring to how Davis has to this point been unable to drum up much of a market. It’s just, this is going to require a lot of money, and it’s hard to know what Davis is going to be. He’s as much a boom-or-bust player as you can find: Last year, he hit as well as Jose Bautista; the year before, he hit as well as Jed Lowrie. He’s been bad and he’s been an MVP candidate, and there’s a whole lot of space in between.
I don’t think player comps can be much help. For one thing, there just aren’t very many. Davis is an unusual player, historically speaking, given his massive power and his massive strikeout side effect. Maybe the two best comps are Jim Thome and Ryan Howard, and their careers went in completely opposite directions. Those comps are as unhelpful as Davis’ recent track record. He could turn out really amazing. He could be a disaster. This isn’t particularly illuminating.
Davis is 230 pounds of uncertainty. The extent of his success will be determined by what happens with a handful of swings every season, and there’s a lot of room for that to go right or wrong. Basically, there’s no achieving actual comfort. There’s only pursuing artificial comfort. That comes out of just learning more information — more knowledge has to be a good thing, right? — so let’s take a look at something that’s been going on under the hood. Let’s learn more about Davis, even if it might not ultimately help to understand what his future’s going to be.