Author Archive

The Strike Zone’s Still Dropping

Nothing groundbreaking here. The primary trend discussed has been discussed at length in other places, with far superior analysis. Here is one example! During the PITCHf/x era, through last season, umpires were granting more and more low strikes. Now we have most of a new season’s worth of data, and, guess what? Trend’s still alive. Trend’s still thriving. There’s never been a better time to be alive as a low strike, provided low strikes appreciate the company of others. We will, henceforth, focus on what I’ve elected to refer to as the zone of interest, because it is our present zone of interest:

zoneofinterest

The black box is an approximation of the average rule-book strike zone. The red zone of interest is somewhat arbitrary, but it more than gets the job done. Sometimes you don’t need to call on superior analytical techniques. Which is good for me, because I don’t know them. Data’s on the way! Thank you, Baseball Savant.

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Mike Zunino’s Keeping Unusual Company

It’s a sign of the times that, when you think about Mike Zunino, you might well first think of his defense. He’s proven himself to be a tremendous receiver of pitches, and when you fold in the rest of his defensive skillset, Zunino has a lot of value, even independent of his bat. There’s evidence to suggest that Zunino is one of the people behind Felix Hernandez’s Cy Young-caliber campaign, and Zunino’s been trusted as a staff leader in his first full year in the bigs. Behind the plate, and off the field, Zunino scores high marks. At the plate, he’s also been interesting, but in more of a peculiar way.

It’s easy enough to look at the normal numbers. An 84 wRC+? He’s young, and, good thing he plays a premium defensive position. A .199 average, a .254 OBP, and a .404 slugging? This provides more insight on the sort of hitter Zunino is — he’s the picture of an over-aggressive power hitter, and you can see why his offensive profile has drawn comparisons to J.P. Arencibia. We’re familiar with this kind of hitter, and most teams probably have at least one or two of this kind of hitter. But it’s in the more minute details that Zunino’s season really stands out.

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Clayton Kershaw, Right Down the Pipe

Clayton Kershaw is having one of those all-time seasons, the kind of season that causes you to reflect on Pedro Martinez and some of his own all-time seasons. Kershaw is running a 1.70 ERA, and a big chunk of that is due to one brief start in the middle of May. The last time Kershaw left a game with an ERA more than 2 was June 29, and while we all recognize that ERA leaves out unearned runs, including Kershaw’s unearned runs lifts his runs-allowed average all the way up to 1.75, because his unearned-runs total is 1. Kershaw’s been a human sort of perfect. Even though he missed the whole month of April, he’s almost a shoo-in for the NL Cy Young, and he’ll get a lot of attention for the league most valuable player. Clayton Kershaw has stepped it up a level, from already having been Clayton Kershaw before.

Let’s think about what makes a great starting pitcher. I mean, in the most general terms. You want a guy to have at least reasonable stuff. Unless the stuff is extremely overpowering, then it’s important to mix up speeds and it’s important to hit locations. One thinks of a lot of ace pitchers as being able to spot the baseball where they want, and absolutely, great pitchers know how to pitch around edges. Kershaw’s no exception. His command this year has been better than ever. What you don’t think of ace pitchers as doing is hurling the ball down the middle very often. That’s the danger zone, the area where you find the bulk of the meatballs. Turns out Kershaw’s not afraid of going down the pipe. Turns out Kershaw doesn’t really get hurt there very much.

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The Worst of the Best: The Month’s Wildest Swings

Hey there everybody, and welcome to the second part of the year’s fifth edition of The Worst Of The Best. Here’s a link to the complete series archive, for you to print out and turn into a volume for your coffee table. And here’s a link to the first part, from several hours ago. This is the right place for you to be, if you’re fixing to see a bunch of bad missed swings. This is decidedly the wrong place for you to be, if you’re hankering for a bunch of sweet dingers. If it’s neither of those things that you seek, well what am I supposed to do, I’m not a mind-reader. Just say what you’re thinking for God’s sake and don’t make a guessing game of your preferences. There are more important things than communication, but most of them, like breathing, are automatic.

So, wild swings, month of August, PITCHf/x, distance from the center of the strike zone. All the usual stuff. Clearly checked swings are excluded, and so are swing attempts during hit-and-runs. Hits-and-run? Regular readers presumably skip right over this paragraph because it never introduces anything new. One of these days I’ll throw in a little twist and then we’ll see who benefits from skimming. I’m just kidding, I’m forever stuck in my ways. Still to come is a top-five list and a next-five list. Also, there are two bonus entries, which I couldn’t include in the countdown but which I also couldn’t ignore. There are basically three sorts of events that could qualify a play for a bonus entry. Here come two of them. By the way, congratulations, you’re not dead, and you have a computer! How great is life?

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The Worst of the Best: The Month’s Wildest Pitches

Hey there everybody, and welcome to the first part of the year’s fifth edition of The Worst Of The Best. If you click here, you can find all of the Worsts Of The Bests. Or you can get to them some other way, because they’re not hidden. All right, so, I would like to begin this post with a joke. Question: which is Jeff Manship’s most favorite baseball team? Answer: why, it’s the Seattle Mariners, of course! This has been the joke. An alternate similar joke would instead choose to highlight the Pittsburgh Pirates. That is a worse joke. We may now move on to the rest of this post, joking complete.

We’ll watch the wildest pitches thrown in the month of August, as captured by PITCHf/x and as mathed by myself and a spreadsheet. PITCHf/x did almost all of the work, but I’ve tied the bow, so I figure I deserve at least 80% or so of the credit. This is all about distance from the center of the estimated strike zone, and since that’s the system I’ve used the whole time, that’s the system I’ve increasingly convinced myself is more than fine enough. Featured in detail will, like normal, be a top-five list. Also, there is a next-five list. The next-five list comes first. Every time, I wonder why I write this paragraph. At least it’s over now.

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Playing Up or Down to the Competition

Over the course of a season, a baseball team will play a lot of games. Some of those will be against good teams! Some of those will be against bad teams. The games against good teams are supposed to be the tests. The games against bad teams are supposed to be the gimmes. There’s a variety of things people say about those games. Those are the games that “good teams are supposed to win.” A team that stumbles might have “overlooked” the opponent, with a tougher one coming up. Then there’s the line about a team that “plays down to the competition.” People have a lot of things to say about losses to bad teams. People have a lot of things to say about sports.

I want to steer your attention to something. For years, Baseball-Reference has provided a split: stats against teams .500 or better, and stats against teams under .500. I think a lot of us have known about this, but I’m not sure I’ve seen the information cited more than a handful of times. It’s a rough split, but it’s a handy split — teams .500 or better tend to be the good teams, and teams under .500 tend to be the bad teams. Let’s settle for the rough split, for now. So, now I want to steer your attention to the Mariners and the Angels.

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FG on Fox: The Entirety of the Jonathan Lucroy MVP Argument

Okay, I’ll grant that now isn’t the best time to talk about the National League MVP Award, with just weeks to go in a closely competitive regular season. I’ll grant that now isn’t the best time to talk about a Brewer winning the NL MVP Award, with the team in a bit of a slide that recently knocked it out of first place. And I’ll grant that now isn’t the best time to talk about Jonathan Lucroy winning the NL MVP award, since he had a stronger first half than his second half has been to date. In a few senses, the timing here could be better. But the timing isn’t better, and we’re already here, so: how’s Jonathan Lucroy look as an MVP candidate?

His is an odd name to see in the running. I think we’re all still getting used to the idea of Lucroy being a really terrific player, and the NL is the league with Clayton Kershaw and Andrew McCutchen and Giancarlo Stanton in it. Last year, McCutchen won the league MVP. Kershaw won the league Cy Young. Lucroy’s never received a single down-ballot MVP vote. But then, before this year, Lucroy hadn’t been an All-Star, so things can change, and Lucroy has more than earned consideration. By no means is this a slam dunk and there are still a few weeks for the overall picture to shift, but we can run through the Lucroy argument point by point.

Jonathan Lucroy has an MVP case. What follows is why.

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Jeff Sullivan FanGraphs Chat — 9/2/14

9:05
Jeff Sullivan: here is a video of a volcano https://www.youtube.com/wat…

9:05
Jeff Sullivan: Let’s chat about baseball! Let’s not chat about fantasy baseball.

9:06
Jeff Sullivan: As a word of warning, I was completely out of touch over the weekend, so good luck getting an insightful answer on anything that’s happened extremely recently. One can catch up only so much

9:06
Comment From Alex
Favorites from the NL, AL?

9:06
Jeff Sullivan: A’s and Nationals

9:07
Jeff Sullivan: Still think of the A’s as the best team in the AL, but now I highly doubt they’re catching the Angels in the division, so that makes things complicated

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FG on Fox: Mike Trout and a League-Wide Trend

Note: this was originally published last Friday. Just not here! Whoopsadoodle!

If you’ve watched an Angels game lately, you’ve probably seen it. If you’ve just read about the Angels lately, you’ve probably heard about it. Every hitter in baseball has his own relative hot zones and relative cold zones, but Mike Trout’s been running a particularly interesting heat map.

It looks something like this:

troutheat

The general message being sent: Mike Trout has been absolutely killing pitches down in and beyond the zone. Yet, he’s been struggling against pitches up. You can see it in color form, as above, or you can see it in numerical form. Against pitches in the lower third of the strike zone this year, Trout’s slugged a spectacular .875. Against pitches in the upper third of the strike zone this year, Trout’s slugged a feeble .211. The former is among the best in the league. The latter’s among the very worst.

Everyone’s picked up on it by now. Trout, I’m sure, knows what’s going on. This is information that’s been noted repeatedly on ESPN and the MLB Network. Based on this, it seems like Trout shouldn’t actually be all that difficult to put away. But, yeah. He’s probably on course to win the American League’s Most Valuable Player award. And despite what the numbers say, Trout’s seen more low pitches than high pitches. To this point, 11 percent of his pitches have been in that upper third. And 14 percent have been in the bottom third. It seems odd, but Trout is just an extreme example of a league-wide trend.

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What Christian Yelich Hasn’t Done Once

I’m not gonna lie to you — there are a lot of things Christian Yelich hasn’t done once. Uncountable things. Infinite things. He hasn’t eclipsed 20 home runs in a season. He hasn’t hit a triple on the road. He hasn’t signed an eight-figure contract. He hasn’t grown to six and a half feet tall. He hasn’t attended Oberlin College, and he hasn’t been drafted by the Phillies. He hasn’t survived an accidental fall from the Golden Gate bridge, nor has he survived an intentional fall from the same. Depending on how you look at it, Christian Yelich hasn’t lived much of a life. But he is doing pretty well at his job at an unusually young age, and let’s talk about something specific he has yet to include in his numbers. You can think of this as an indicator of success, to go along with the other, more traditional indicators of success, like, batting average.

We’ll make use of batted-ball information! We’ve got that on FanGraphs stretching back to 2002. Since 2002, 790 batters have put at least 500 balls in play. Yelich is now among them, as of not long ago. Within the sample, no one’s hit more infield flies than Vernon Wells, at 376. He has a 41-pop lead on Albert Pujols. No one’s hit a greater rate of infield flies than Eric Byrnes, who’s just in front of Tony Batista. At the other extreme are known pop-up avoiders. You know about Joey Votto. Joe Mauer doesn’t hit pop-ups, either. For all his faults, Ryan Howard belongs in this same group, as does Derek Jeter. As for Yelich? He’s at 0. He doesn’t have an infield fly to his name. He is currently the only such batter in the given player pool.

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