Author Archive

The Dwindling Chances of Seeing a Triple

The game before us is forever changing, because it has to be. Even when there aren’t abrupt changes in rules or dimensions or make of the baseball, there are changes in strategies and changes in the player pool. Those changes that do take place tend to be subtle, gradual, and we’re all well aware of certain league-wide trends.

We know that strikeouts are higher than they’ve ever been. This past season, the strikeout rate also rose just one-tenth of one percentage point. We know that we’re seeing a little less bunting these days, and we know that offense is down relative to what it was in what many choose to refer to as the Steroid Era. We know that, for whatever reason, there are more hard-throwing pitchers, coming out of seemingly every bullpen and sometimes even starting games. Fewer people might be aware of the trend with triples. And fewer still might be aware of what just happened in 2013.

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The Greatness of Frank Thomas

All the great players in the Hall of Fame have stories about them, anecdotes that capture glimpses of how they were exceptional, even among the already exceptional. Anecdotes developed in part out of exaggeration but largely founded on inconceivable truth. Here’s an old anecdote about Frank Thomas:

“We had this competition, even when he was a freshman, in which we’d wager a Coke on whether he could guess—within one mile an hour—how fast a pitcher was throwing. We had a radar gun. He’d call out the velocity. He was always on. Almost never fooled.”

It’s been my understanding that policemen are trained to do this with vehicles. Frank Thomas wasn’t a policeman, but he was sort of an officer of home plate in a way, and he was liberal with discipline. What was apparent, even early in college, was that Thomas had an unusually gifted sense of the zone. He went on to pair that with one of the best swings ever and now he’s on his way to Cooperstown, a part of baseball immortality. Pretty simple. Thomas was just one of the best at something, and also one of the best at a related something. That allowed him to be one of the best overall.

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The Greatness of Tom Glavine

Every career in the history of baseball, every life that’s ever been lived — they all could’ve turned out differently, unrecognizably differently, given one little change along the way. Sometimes, you have to search for what those changes could’ve been. Other times, they flash in blinding neon. Tom Glavine was born in 1966. In June of 1984, he was drafted by the Atlanta Braves. In June of 1984, he was also drafted by the Los Angeles Kings. The Braves chose him 47th, while the Kings chose him 69th, ahead of some future superstars. There was the opportunity for Glavine to play hockey and go to college for free. He chose, with some difficulty, to go where baseball might lead him. On this day, he’s become all but an official Hall-of-Famer.

Frank Thomas is going into the Hall of Fame. The talent of Frank Thomas was obvious from the beginning. Thomas left no doubt in any observer’s mind that he was one of the best hitters there ever was. Greg Maddux is going into the Hall of Fame. Maddux had plenty of talent, and also the dedication to maximize it. Maddux required a bit of a longer look, but it was immediately apparent he could do things with the baseball others just couldn’t. Tom Glavine is going into the Hall of Fame. Glavine didn’t have Thomas’ gilded skillset, and he didn’t have Maddux’s ability to miss bats and hit gnats. Glavine’s greatest strength was getting something extraordinary out of considerably duller parts.

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Mike Trout: Top-Ten Outfield

It’s not so much that we’re in the offseason’s dead period — we’re just in its waiting period. There’s a lot of life left, but there likely won’t be any breaths until we get to Masahiro Tanaka’s signing deadline, at which point several dominoes ought to fall. That’s two and a half weeks away, and for the time being there’s not much going on. Dave and Carson talked on the podcast about how the things being written about these days are Tanaka and the Hall of Fame. As a change of pace out of desperation, I’m choosing to turn to the comfortable default FanGraphs fallback, that being Mike Trout, and how very good he is.

This is a question from my own chat earlier Tuesday:

Comment From Eddie
How many MLB outfields post less value than Mike Trout in 2014? Have to think the Cubs are on that list.

I was in love with the idea right away, and below, my subsequent investigation. I’d like to thank Eddie for the prompt, and for giving me another reason to re-visit Mike Trout’s unparalleled player page. Obviously, we can’t know anything yet about how the coming season is going to go. But we do have complicated mathematical guesses, which I’m happy to depend on for these purposes. By WAR, how many outfields does Mike Trout project to out-produce on his own during the 2014 regular season?

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Jeff Sullivan FanGraphs Chat — 1/7/14

9:04
Jeff Sullivan: Let’s do this thing. Less late than last week!

9:04
Jeff Sullivan: This looks like it might be my last chat with CiL classic 🙁 I’m afraid of sweeping change

9:04
Jeff Sullivan: Or even minor, barely-noticeable change. To be honest I haven’t bothered to investigate

9:05
Comment From Swing and a Miss Puiggy
ruh roh….what changes are in store w/ CiL?

9:05
Jeff Sullivan: I don’t know. The screencaps make it look like big ones. Could be little ones but I like the current model! The classic model! Keep CiL Classic!

9:05
Comment From Froglegs Jackson
Do you know when ZIPS projections will start appearing on player pages?

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The Problem With Stephen Drew’s Market

If Stephen Drew were a better player, he’d be in greater demand. I guess you could say that’s the main problem with the free agent’s current market. The better a player is, the more that player is wanted, and I can’t believe this is a sentence I’m writing on FanGraphs. It’s the same with literally everyone. If any given player were better, he’d be in more demand and/or he’d be guaranteed more money. Remember, every player has room for improvement, and baseball is such an easy game! There’s no excuse for not being perfect, really.

Drew’s good, though. Good enough to be wanted by someone. He’s in his 30s, but he’s not old, and he’s a proven, everyday shortstop. He seems to be over his grisly ankle injury, and he was worth 3.4 wins for a World Series champion during a season in which he missed a few weeks. He can hit a little, he can field,and he plays up the middle. Given no other information, you’d figure that sort of player would be pretty appealing. Yet what we observe is that Drew’s market hardly exists. We can never be sure of the inside reality — and we don’t know how this is going to turn out — but for now, it looks more like Drew’s in pursuit of a team, rather than a team is in pursuit of Drew.

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The Worst Position on a Contending Team

The best position on a contending team is center field for the Angels. This is because that’s where Mike Trout is. There’s no single greater roster advantage in baseball right now than possessing Mike Trout. So, writing about the worst of something might seem needlessly negative, or bitterly critical, but there’s no sense in writing about the best of this, because everybody already knows. Already, we struggle with not writing every single FanGraphs article about Mike Trout. This is indirectly about Trout, in that it’s about positions that project to be the anti-Trout.

The long and short of it is that I wanted to know which position projects to be the worst out of teams looking to contend in the season ahead. It’s impossible to do perfectly, but there’s a lot at our disposal. We’ve got staff-generated team-by-team depth charts, and corresponding Steamer projections. We’ve got projections on a team level, allowing us to identify teams with legitimate hopes. If nothing else, this should get us in the ballpark, as we search for areas of considerable need. The worst position on a contender is a position that probably ought to be addressed, soon.

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Revisiting the Myth of the Five-Man Rotation

The other day, Eno wrote something up about the importance of team depth, and about the importance of being able to measure it. I think the thing I like most about the A’s roster right now is how it’s so deep in so many places. The Cardinals, too, have given themselves some flexibility. Depth is something you never think about at first — at first, you’re simply focused on the top bits of the depth chart — but for as much as the need for particular depth is unpredictable, odds are those extra players are going to matter. Players who aren’t on the opening-day roster, or who aren’t starters, are going to end up responsible for attempted runs scored and attempted runs prevented.

I think most people have a good understanding that it matters to have starting-pitcher depth beyond the front five. At least, most people who hang around at places like FanGraphs. We all get that pitchers are volatile, and we all get that pitchers get injured. Yet still there’s a focus on just the first five, because no pitcher is individually super likely to break down, and if the five are good enough you should never need a replacement, right? People talk about filling out five-man rotations, but really, a team would be fortunate to lean on a five-man rotation, and I thought it could be useful to provide some updated numbers from the season most recently finished. Those sixth and seventh starters in a system — they’re going to get innings. Sometimes a lot of them.

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Where Could Nelson Cruz Even Fit?

A few things to know about Nelson Cruz:

  • Cruz is 33 years old
  • He’s coming off a PED suspension
  • The last three years, he’s been worth the same WAR as Sean Rodriguez and John Buck
  • He’s a free agent seeking four or five years and about $15 million per

Cruz’s contract wishes are memorable, in the same way that Ervin Santana’s nine-figure contract wishes are memorable. Terms players want aren’t necessarily indicative of anything — ultimately, players have to play for what a team is willing to spend. Cruz might very well fall way short of what he came into the offseason seeking. It’s already January, and at least Santana has the excuse that his market has been held up by the Masahiro Tanaka situation. Cruz is just waiting to be bid on, and he doesn’t seem to have too broad a market. And, though we can’t know what his market actually is, we can attempt to determine it from the outside. Below, a quick review of all 30 teams as potential Nelson Cruz landing spots.

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Baseball’s Anti-TTO Ballpark

I can recall a handful of baseball stats that have just blown me away upon first viewing. Most recently, I was floored by advancements in pitch-framing research, and now I can’t think about any catcher without looking up how well he does or doesn’t receive. Obviously, PITCHf/x was sort of world-changing right away, and the same goes for the glimpses we’ve had of HITf/x. Years and years ago, I thought we solved almost everything with general batted-ball data, and I also remember opening a book and seeing batting averages and slugging percentages against specific pitch types. And there was an article I read in the Hardball Times, talking about various park factors. Some of them have been obvious for a long time. But it wasn’t until that day that I realized parks can affect outcomes like strikeouts and bases on balls.

There’s every reason for that to make sense. Every single ballpark is different, so in a way, every single ballpark’s version of baseball is different. The baseball will look different to the batter, and how the batter sees the ball is sort of one of the game’s fundamental components. The batter’s decision and swing lead to everything else. But what this isn’t is intuitive, or easily explained. People don’t pay much attention to these park factors, because they’re weird and ultimately not that important. Yet they exist and ought to be acknowledged, and one park in particular is extreme in a number of ways.

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