A couple weeks ago, I examined, on the team level, who has and hasn’t been drawing a benefit from the called strike zone. That post is here, and it talks about the zone while pitching, and about the zone while hitting. Earlier this very week, I looked at some individual hitter strike zones through the season’s first half, and that post is here. It makes sense to look at individual pitchers. If we have the team data, and if we have some individual hitter data, why not close the loop? I don’t want to leave you wanting more. I want to leave you never wanting to hear about this stuff again, or at least not for a while.

When a hitter’s had a particularly big or small strike zone, that seems to be luck, for the most part. Some of it’s the competition, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a signal. With pitchers, there’s more of a signal, because they’re the ones in control. And they’re also linked to their catchers, who might be good or bad pitch-framers. If a hitter’s been, say, lucky with strikes, that hardly means anything going forward. But if a pitcher’s racked up extra strikes, that bodes well for what’s to come. That’s something to keep in mind when you read all the rest.

We’ll be looking at pitchers with more or fewer strikes than expected. As you peruse the tables, you’ll be seeing evidence of skill, but skill that leaves many frustrated. Pitchers with good command tend to get more favorable zones than pitchers with bad command. And pitchers with good receivers will get more favorable zones than pitchers with bad receivers. Command is a developed skill, and receiving is a developed skill, but to a lot of people, the strike zone is the strike zone, and it shouldn’t shift around. To a lot of people, it should be called the same for everybody. It’s not! Maybe one day. For now, we’re still in our day.

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Not to beat a dead horse, or any kind of horse, but the Matt Kemp trade has been lopsided. There’s still an awful long way to go, but for now the Matt Kemp trade is more like the Yasmani Grandal trade, and Grandal and the Dodgers couldn’t be happier. The other day on Twitter I was tipped off to an article about Grandal written by Matt Calkins. The headline: “Padres blew it with Yasmani Grandal.” It talks about Grandal’s limited playing time, and the lack of trust some Padres pitchers had in him. One paragraph stood out to me as particularly interesting:

Despite the general San Diego approach being to throw down and away, Grandal thought the power pitchers should be throwing inside in the early part of the count before using the outer half of the plate to record the out. But the veteran hurlers weren’t catching his drift, and as a result, he wasn’t catching their pitches.

Pitchers identified were Andrew Cashner, Tyson Ross, and Ian Kennedy. Last season, Grandal didn’t catch Cashner. Ross eventually stopped throwing to him, and Kennedy did too. They preferred working with Rene Rivera. This year, the Padres pitching staff has struggled. From the bottom of the same article:

San Diego’s pitching, however, has disappointed, and Grandal can’t help but wonder if that would be the case had his advice been heeded.

On the one hand, this doesn’t really matter. Grandal isn’t in San Diego anymore, so everyone just ought to move on. But on the other hand, this can be an interesting thing to investigate. So let’s talk about what Grandal talked about.

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The Blue Jays are a pretty good team. Sometimes they look like a very good team, and with an upgrade or two, they might get to that level consistently. There’s a decent shot this is the team that busts the extended franchise playoff slump, and with the trade deadline around the corner, you know the front office is active. They’ve been open about the activity, and you can see where upgrades would be wanted. Because of the Blue Jays’ situation, I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of a Johnny Cueto/Aroldis Chapman addition for a package built around Jeff Hoffman and Daniel Norris. And then more, presumably. Extreme seller’s market and everything.

From an outsider’s perspective, it would be a blockbuster. It would change the landscape of the American League now, and it could shift the Reds’ future fortunes. That said, there are a few hurdles. For the Jays, Norris could conceivably help in 2015. It’s also not impossible to imagine Hoffman making a difference in the bullpen down the stretch. And for the Reds, if you deal Chapman, that subtracts from 2016, and then that takes you to a slippery slope. The Reds might not want to go that far. If they had their druthers, they’d move rentals and try to get back at it a year from now.

So maybe that’s not so realistic. Maybe the Reds don’t want to tear down. And maybe the Jays don’t want to take anything at all away from 2015. The idea could use some restructuring. Which brings us to something I’m going to hate: I absolutely love the guy, but, imagine if the Jays were to dangle Marcus Stroman.

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When you write up the worst called ball of the first half, you’re set up for a two-part series. You have to write up the worst called strike of the first half, as well, or else it feels like something is missing. Usually, I make my own editorial decisions. Technically, this was my decision. But really, this decision was out of my hands. Once the first post went, the second was guaranteed to follow.

Bad called strikes, I think, are less upsetting than bad called balls. Oh, they’re both annoying, but the worst called balls are on pitches down the middle, and it seems inconceivable that an umpire could miss a pitch down the pipe. It’s easier to see why an umpire might grant a strike on a pitch out of the zone. There’s no such thing as the middle of the out-of-the-zone. We’ve grown accustomed to seeing strikes off the plate, so, what’s another inch or two? When you see a strike out of the zone, you think, ugh, whatever. When you see a ball on a pitch down the middle, you think, how did that happen? This is the long way of saying this post might be less interesting than the first one.

But here we are anyway, and your own curiosity will prevent you from leaving this post until you see the result. What’s been the worst called strike of the first half? I don’t mean the strike with the lowest called-strike probability, adjusting for count and handedness and everything. I mean just relative to the rule-book zone, which is directly over home plate. This pitch was 10.7 inches away from the border of the rule-book zone, as it crossed the front plane:

Pretty bad! Lefty strike, but, pretty bad. Clearly outside. One pitch was worse than this.

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Don’t allow the recent slump to throw you off. If the Astros were to keep winning games at their season pace, then by next Wednesday they’d have more wins than they did in all of 2013. By Thursday, a week later, they’d have more wins than they did in 2012, and by that Saturday, they’d have more wins than they did in 2011. By the penultimate day of August, they’d have more wins than they did a season ago. And then there would be 31 games left. The speed with which we adjust our expectations means there are people who are disappointed by how the Astros closed out the first half, but this has been a great season, a blessing of a season, a season of competitive baseball that even recently would’ve been almost impossible to imagine. For the Houston Astros, 2015 has been wonderful.

Which comes with the upside: unexpected success. Everybody loves unexpected success. It’s good for the players, it’s good for the coaches, it’s good for the fans, and it’s good for the organization. But this also comes with a challenge: figure out how to navigate the rest of the month. The Astros might’ve expected 2015 to be another year of building. Now they’re in position to trade from the long-term to try to improve the short-term. The Astros will be perhaps the most interesting team to watch in the days and weeks ahead, because if they wanted, they could be awful aggressive.

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Just because of the sheer number of taken pitches in a season, hitters will frequently disagree on a call with the judge standing behind them. A certain number of disagreements are to be expected, but from the sounds of things, Dexter Fowler feels like he’s been disagreeing more than usual. Fowler doesn’t think his approach is worse, but his numbers are worse, so he identifies some iffy calls as a factor. This is what Fowler looks like after an iffy strike call:

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A lesson you learn as you grow older is that everything is somewhere on a spectrum. Though we yearn for blacks and whites, for certainties and absolutes, the world is more complicated than that, littered with partials and mitigations. Seldom does everything point in one direction. Seldom do we even know about everything pointing. There is always much we can’t or don’t figure out. There is a neat thing, though, about spectra — each one has two extremes. So when we know enough, we might be able to identify points near an extreme. The least-talented running back. The most challenging summit. The worst called ball by an umpire.

Strikes and balls are most definitely on a spectrum. The strike zone might be precisely defined, but it’s impossible for humans to call it that way, given our own limitations, which means any given pitch has a certain likelihood of being called a strike, and a certain likelihood of being called a ball. Most controversial calls take place around the boundaries. That area where taken pitches end up as coin flips. But sometimes there are bad calls beyond the boundaries, within or without. These head toward our extremes. Armed with PITCHf/x, it’s possible to find the worst called ball, by looking for balls on pitches down the middle. They’re uncommon, but they happen. What’s been the worst called ball of the 2015 first half? The following pitch was called a ball, though it was 3.0 inches from the center of the strike zone:

The worst called ball is worse than this.

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Given all the controversies they’ve been through this year, you’d almost want to think the Angels were having a bad season. Only a few months ago, ownership ran Josh Hamilton out of town, and while it did so figuratively, you get the sense it would’ve done it literally. Not very long after that, a team executive was dismissed after using words like “segregation” in an interview about ticket policies and attendance. And of course, the other week, the general manager packed up his office and left, his relationship with Mike Scioscia finally reaching the breaking point. From a PR perspective, for the Angels, it’s been a year to forget. Except for this recent stretch of winning, that’s moved the Angels into first place.

The baseball season will suck you in. It’s 162 games long, and it wants you to feel every single one of them. It wants you to celebrate every runner left stranded; it wants you to curse every failed call to the bullpen. The baseball season pitches itself as an election — every game matters. And it’s true, that every game does matter. But it’s terribly easy to get too wrapped up in the day-to-day trivialities. Ultimately, every team will win a bunch of games, and every team will lose a bunch of games. Baseball is best consumed every day, but it might be best understood every week or two. An ordinary standings page will include an “L10” column. You can learn a lot from one glance. Forget, for a moment, about all of the details; over their past 10 games, the Angels are 7-3. The Astros and Rangers are both 2-8. The A’s and the Mariners are a harmless 5-5. Divide a season into 10-game blocks, and over the most recent block, the Angels have made their move.

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The first thing you learn about following sports is that there’s nothing more important than the standings. Wins and losses are everything. They control how you feel about a team, and they control how you feel about the individual players. They determine whether a team will be in contention for a championship, and as far as people believe, when they first get into this, it’s all about titles. It’s not, but that realization comes down the road.

Something you learn later on is that, yeah, the standings are important, but they might not be predictive. It’s fun when your team has a bunch of wins, but that doesn’t guarantee a bunch of future wins to follow. Sports fans are always doing what they can to try to tell the future. No one can ever do well, but you can do better or worse.

Future-telling is the goal of projection systems. You could argue, maybe, the goal is to estimate a player or team’s true talent at a moment in time, but true talent is virtually indistinguishable from expected future performance. Projections are everywhere in baseball analysis. Even when the word itself isn’t used, observers are always making educated guesses about what’s going to happen, which is a form of projecting. Official projection systems formalize it.

People have some trust issues with projections. Humans always want to believe they’re smarter than human-designed machines or systems, and they especially distrust projections when they show something different from what’s already happened. When projections are at odds with evidence, projections are given funny looks. It’s perfectly natural, yet it leaves projections always needing to be validated. In this article, let’s consider projections. And let’s consider wins and losses. And let’s consider what matters more, if we’re trying to look ahead.

A little over a month ago, I tried a project. I had, in my possession, 10 years of preseason team projections. The season was also about two months old, so I reviewed the previous 10 years of baseball, around the two-month mark. I was curious what was a better predictor of the next four months: team performance over the first two months, or preseason team projection. As it turned out, the projections fared quite a bit better. After two months, you’re better off keeping the same opinion of a team you had in March.

Here, I want to do something similar. But there are two twists.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

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