Let’s watch a little MLB Gameday, you and I. I’ll select Saturday’s matchup between the Rays and the Orioles. Below, you’re going to see all four of Manny Machado’s plate appearances. Note that I could’ve selected Sunday’s game instead and demonstrated the same thing, but on Saturday, Machado faced more pitches. Four simple .gifs:
It’s not just a spring-training blip anymore. For one or two games, you can dismiss a pitcher working with reduced velocity. Sometimes mechanics can be slightly off. Sometimes a pitcher can just be under the weather. Jered Weaver’s gone beyond that. His velocity was way down in spring training, and it’s carried over into each of his regular-season starts. Weaver is down a full three ticks, and that’s a dramatic decline between years. Unsurprisingly, he’s been bad — he’s struck out just one of every 10 hitters. One season ago, his rate was twice as high.
Between years, for starting pitchers, the biggest fastball velocity drop belongs to Derek Holland, and he’s on the disabled list. The second-biggest drop belongs to Henderson Alvarez, and he’s on the disabled list. The fourth-biggest drop belongs to Homer Bailey, and he’s on the disabled list. Weaver owns the third-biggest drop, and he says he feels fine. Which means there’s either something wrong that doesn’t hurt, or this is just what he is. This isn’t what he wants to be.
The Cubs are a running team, now. Wasn’t always that way. Wasn’t that way even one season ago. One season ago, the Cubs finished with just 65 stolen bases, seventh-fewest in the majors. This year, they already have 25, second-most in the majors. If you fold unsuccessful steals into the mix, last year the Cubs were the worst stealing team in baseball. So far this year, fourth-best. No one ever wins the World Series because of the running game, but improvements are improvements, and this is a legitimate change.
And, well, this year’s Cubs have a bunch of new players. They also have a new manager, so maybe it’s not the most surprising thing in the world that they’ve become more aggressive with their legs. Joe Maddon liked to put the game in motion in Tampa Bay, and in spring training with Chicago he made baserunning a priority. On the other hand, here’s Anthony Rizzo, also from spring training:
“We don’t steal much on this team anyway.”
Rizzo, perhaps, wasn’t yet used to playing with Dexter Fowler. Fowler’s already stolen six bags. That’s good enough to tie him for eighth in the majors. But let’s keep that figure in mind. As of this writing, 15 players have stolen at least six bases. That’s a somewhat arbitrary line, but I chose it for a reason. Here are the 15:
It’s worth going over the stolen-base history of these guys. Generally speaking, guys who steal will steal, and guys who don’t steal will not steal. You know how stealing is. Let’s ask of each player a very basic question: Has the player ever before stolen 20 bases in a major- or minor-league season?
| 9:11 |
: Well, we’ve done it again
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| 9:12 |
: We’ve successfully opened a live baseball chat, ten minutes after the scheduled beginning
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| 9:12 |
: One of these weeks, I’m going to be early. Stay on your toes!
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| 9:13 |
When we say a hitter had a good game, what we really mean is that he got relatively lucky in his 5 or so plate appearances. Similarly, is a “good game” for a pitcher a real thing, or a result of stringing together lucky innings? It looks to me like there are days when pitchers have their stuff or don’t, and people talk this way, but has anybody looked into this? |
| 9:14 |
: The way I think of it, it’s easier to tell if a pitcher has a good game than a hitter. A pitcher goes out and throws 100 pitches or so against a bunch of different guys, while a hitter might see 15-20 pitches and he has no control over what they are or where they go
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| 9:14 |
: So while *all* single-game analyses are complicated, I think a single start is more revealing than a single game in the lineup. You can evaluate a pitcher just by seeing how he’s locating. What’s the batter equivalent?
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It seemed like this post was practically going to be able to write itself. Hanley Ramirez has been hot at the plate, and he’s tied for the big-league lead in homers, with 10. There are hundreds of hot streaks by so many players every single season, but this year we have the treat of new data, and Ramirez’s has seemed particularly remarkable. I thought this would be simple and straightforward, but instead we have something more complicated and kind of boring to what I assume would be the majority of people. Keep reading, though! There’ll be some .gifs. You love .gifs.
If you’ve paid attention to Gameday, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve started to get some early-season batted-ball data. It hasn’t been complete, but it’s been fairly consistent, as one of the first signs of the rolling out of StatCast. It can be tricky to find and preserve that information, but thankfully for the masses, there’s Baseball Savant, which I feel like I must link in every post. There, for the first time, we can sort hitters by batted-ball velocities. The industry has had HITf/x for years, so this isn’t progress for them, but it’s progress for us, on the outside. And we all love a new toy.
This is one of those posts I like to write over and over. We’re always getting new information, meaning we’re always getting new borderline calls, and when there’s room for error around the fringes, that means there’s a non-zero chance something could go more dreadfully wrong. Like, say, a pitch being taken down the middle, and getting called a ball. Humans are perfect at nothing, not even the things that we think we’re perfect at, and a baseball season has a whole lot of pitches in it. Lots of opportunities for funny, uncommon mistakes. When it occurs to me, I try to find them.
I don’t do it because I delight in pointing out when umpires mess up. I really don’t, because their job is harder than my job, and I don’t like to pile on. Everyone’s capable of stupid mistakes. I do it because, think about it. We’re used to seeing questionable calls around the edges. But, right down the middle? It’s the kind of mistake you want to investigate, because you feel like something must’ve happened. My goal when I do this is to try to understand why the call got made how it did. Find an explanation for the seemingly inexplicable. I don’t know why this interests me so much, but, here we are, and no one on staff has told me to stop.
We’ve had weeks of baseball in 2015. There’s nothing particularly significant about right now, but let’s reflect anyway on what’s taken place. Let’s search for those called balls on pitches taken down the middle.
You shouldn’t need very much of an introduction. Beginning a few months ago, the Padres became one of the most interesting teams in baseball, totally out of the blue. The new front office completely overhauled a bad roster, and as a part of their maneuvering, they pretty clearly prioritized offensive punch over defensive capability. For a few weeks, now, the Padres have been playing games. It’s easy to see how they’ve done as a team. It’s easy to see how well they’ve been able to hit. Defensive performance is a little more hidden. So, let’s quickly check in on the Padres’ team defense.
Before this post gets published, the White Sox and Orioles will begin a baseball game in Baltimore played before no one. The few scouts in attendance will keep to themselves, and those watching from elsewhere will be unheard. There will probably be birds, and birds are always making noise, but we’re generally pretty good at tuning them out, because they never shut up. Two things, before going further:
(1) Of course, what’s going on in the rest of Baltimore is of far greater significance than what’s going on inside Camden Yards. For every one thought about the baseball game, there ought to be ten million thoughts about the civil unrest, and what it means and what’s to learn. My job, though, is to write about baseball, and so this is a post about baseball. I am qualified to do very few other things.
(2) The game will be played under extraordinary circumstances, but it’s also one game. A sample of one is, for all intents and purposes, no better than a sample of zero, so we’re not going to learn much today. We’d need a few thousand of these to really research and establish some conclusions. The post basically concerns the hypothetical, inspired by what’s taking place.
Home-field advantage exists in all sports. It’s a known thing, to varying degrees. The first thing that occurs to most people, as far as an explanation is concerned, is that the team at home has people yelling in support of it. The team on the road, meanwhile, has people yelling other things at it. The average person prefers support over mean and critical remarks. Now, consider the game in Baltimore. Strip the crowd effect away completely. What could that do? What might we expect of the home-field advantage of a team that plays with no fans?
This seems to be this season’s week to weigh in on the designated-hitter debate. It’s a debate people will have over and over again, making the same points, until baseball changes the way things operate, and even then for a little longer still. What sparked the latest discussion, of course, was Adam Wainwright’s season-ending injury, which wouldn’t have happened as a hitter if he didn’t have to hit. To many, it was just unnecessary, especially given how dangerous it is to just pitch, and so on we go, into a most familiar back-and-forth.
I don’t think I have a position. That won’t surprise some of you. I’m obviously a fan of a version of baseball that has different rules for different leagues. If the rules were made to be the same, I imagine I’d remain a fan of the result. I think my true position is that, while I’d understand if the National League were given a DH, I’d miss the pitcher-hitting statistics. It’s just one of the things that I’m into, because pitcher hitting is like a rulebook-mandated experiment. The numbers are silly, and I spend more of my time thinking about baseball than I do watching baseball. It’s more fun to think about a version of baseball where sometimes, pitchers have to hit for themselves, even though they all suck.
And speaking of all of them sucking — boy, do they ever. You’ve long known this to be true, with rare exception. But you might not have noticed what’s gone on for this season’s first month. Things are getting worse.
Let’s reflect on the FanGraphs staff predictions, shall we? Seems like a great idea for the 28th of April. Every single voter selected the Nationals to win the National League East. Okay, great start. Taijuan Walker got the most votes for the American League Rookie of the Year, and his ERA’s almost 7. Daniel Norris also got some meaningful support. Devon Travis got half as many votes as Norris did. So the best you could say is that Travis at least got his name picked by a few people. I bring this up because, as silly as it is to be thinking about awards in the season’s first month, right now Travis ranks third in baseball in wRC+. Perhaps more shocking, Travis ranks fourth in baseball in isolated power. The Blue Jays decided to start Travis out of the gate even though he never spent a day at the highest level of the minors. All he’s done is out-hit the scorching-hot Nelson Cruz.
And this is a Toronto second baseman we’re talking about. Certainly, it’s not like the position is cursed. There’ve been good second basemen in Toronto before, and there’ll be good second basemen in Toronto again, after the Travis days are over. But the Blue Jays are the reason you even recognize the name Ryan Goins. Devon Travis isn’t Ryan Goins. It’s not quite clear what Devon Travis is, but one answer seems to be “surprisingly powerful.”