First unnecessary reminder: big-league baseball players are extraordinarily talented, each and every one of them. Second unnecessary reminder: big-league baseball players are also imperfect, prone to frequent mistakes. For evidence of the former, consider most of the action in every game, where pitchers are throwing balls that move at 95 miles per hour and hitters are sometimes hitting them fair and far. For evidence of the latter, consider missed spots or off-balance swings. Consider errors on what would ordinarily be routine plays. Baseball games are littered with material for the positive and cynical alike.

A fun thing to examine is pitcher strike rates in 3-and-0 counts against pitchers, or in 3-and-0 counts with the bases loaded. You’d expect much higher strike rates than you actually observe. In this way, we see that pitchers are flawed when it comes to their ability to throw to a rectangle. Sticking with 3-and-0 counts, we can find something of a hitter equivalent. In those counts, pitchers usually want to throw strikes. In those counts, hitters usually want to swing only at hittable strikes. So we can find hitter mistakes by exploring swings in 3-and-0 counts at pitches out of the zone. You can think of them as momentary breakdowns in discipline.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

A pretty common question we see in FanGraphs chats is what one statistic we’d use to evaluate pitchers, if we could use only one. The truthful answer is always a non-answer: You shouldn’t ever use just one statistic. It’s an unrealistic hypothetical, and good evaluation is done with a blend of different data. But I will say that I tend to look at xFIP early on, just to get a sense of what I’m dealing with. It’s a number that can scrape out a whole bunch of noise. Something I noticed is that, this season, Max Scherzer posted a 3.16 xFIP. Rick Porcello posted a 3.19 xFIP. Both were full-time starters for the same team, and one of them, presumably, is about to win the American League Cy Young Award.

It’s a comparison that’s interesting enough on its own, but adding more significance to the comparison is talk that the Tigers will explore trading one of these two pitchers in the weeks and months ahead. There’s skepticism everywhere that a team like the Tigers would actually think deeply about moving Scherzer, considering everything, but the ace is one year from free agency and he’s represented by Scott Boras. Porcello is two years from free agency, and the Tigers have Drew Smyly just about ready to resume starting. Really, the Tigers aren’t limited to picking one between Scherzer and Porcello, but things could well work out that way. And in talking about this, xFIP is only the start.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most remarkable things about the Internet is the speed with which news finds its way to updated Wikipedia pages. Even during the MLB playoffs, you can usually find notes about player achievements or umpire errors within a matter of minutes. MLB.com does not operate like Wikipedia, in that not just anyone can go in and change things around. But there is one similarity, in that here’s a screenshot of part of the Twins’ official roster from earlier Monday:

Somebody’s conspicuously absent. Let’s scroll down just a bit:

Read the rest of this entry »

When I looked at this toward the end of August, a lot of baseball had happened. Enough baseball that I felt it worthwhile to take a look at this. Since that point, the rest of baseball happened, so now that we have season closure, it seems like it’s time for a second and final update. We can now officially answer the question: which individual pitch was the most unhittable during the 2013 regular season? Beyond that, which were the most unhittable pitches from relievers, and which were the most unhittable pitches from starters?

Of course, in updating the first post, I have to issue all the same caveats as in the first post. So in a sense I’m just writing the same thing again, with some different numbers and pictures. What this really is is a post containing contact-rate leaderboards. The pitches you’re going to see are the pitches that yielded the lowest rates of contact, getting therefore the highest rates of whiffs. That seems like a good way to explore unhittability, but as you understand, pitching is complex, and every pitch depends in some way on every other pitch.

Read the rest of this entry »

As much as we’ve all grown accustomed to citing FIP, and trusting FIP, the theory is always kind of staggering at first, no matter who you are or what your background. The principle is that pitchers have little control over the results of their balls in play allowed. The evidence is convincing and exhausting. And it’s so challenging to come to terms with, because it flies in the face of what people are taught playing baseball growing up, and because different pitchers have different abilities to put the pitches where they want. How could location possibly be that unimportant, at least in that one particular regard? Don’t some spots lead to worse contact than others? Can’t some guys throw more pitches to those very spots?

Some people are still working on the investigation, and of course we know that BABIP isn’t completely random. For example, there’s the meaningful difference between groundball pitchers and fly-ball pitchers. But the general conclusion’s still valid. It never stops being a little weird when you stop and think about it, and what’s presented below contributes to the weirdness.

Read the rest of this entry »

We all had a good sense going into things last season that the Tigers would have a pretty lousy team defense. The Tigers themselves understood defense wasn’t the priority, and in the end, they allowed the second-highest BABIP in the American League. Yet Max Scherzer, individually, finished at .259. At the other end of the spectrum, the Royals and Cubs featured pretty good overall team defenses. Edwin Jackson allowed a .322 BABIP. Wade Davis allowed a .361 BABIP. Defensive performance, not unlike run support, varies, and different pitchers can get different levels of support from the same group of gloves. Of course, BABIP isn’t explained by defense 100%, but it is a major component. It’s defense, pitching, and luck.

Along similar lines, just as we understand which teams do and do not have good defenses, we’re developing an understanding of which teams do and do not have good pitch-receivers behind the plate. The Braves, for example, have long had quality receivers. Ryan Doumit’s employers, meanwhile, have been a catastrophe. But pitch-receiving performance also varies, in large part just because of our small sample sizes, meaning two different guys on the same staff can end up pitching to different strike zones. So while we’ve talked about catchers here, I want to spend this post talking about pitchers. Which pitchers in 2013 threw to the biggest zones? Which pitchers threw to the smallest ones?

Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball Savant is a wonderful online resource, the sort of resource a part of me doesn’t want to talk about in fear of you guys finding out all my secrets. It’s a place where you can run your own PITCHf/x queries, and the site chooses to split its strike zone up into nine equivalent areas. That’s the approximate rulebook strike zone, and presented below — from the catcher’s perspective — please find the 2013 league called-strike rate by sub-zone. This is simply called strikes / (called strikes + called balls).

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the simplest smart offseason rule of thumb: it should never be about specific improvements. It should be about improvements, however. No team needs to go out and try to land some right-handed power hitting. Those teams just need to get better. No team needs to go out and try to land a left-handed starting pitcher. Those teams just need to get better. The St. Louis Cardinals don’t necessarily need to replace Pete Kozma with a superior shortstop. They just need to get better, and if they get better somewhere else, great. They should get a shortstop. But they don’t need to get a shortstop to have a good offseason, is the point. When it comes to improving, it pays to be as open-minded as possible.

But even if we all know that to be true, we still feel in our hearts like we wish our teams had more of one or two things. We tend to want more dingers, or more defense, or more quality baserunning, or less attempted baserunning, or more flamethrowers in the bullpen. We think a lot in terms of acquiring specific skills, even if that isn’t or shouldn’t be the point, and these days one more specific skill we can quantify is pitch-receiving. There are fans out there who are rooting for their team to sign a good framer of pitches. Or, rooting for their team to not sign a bad framer of pitches. Pitch-framing is a thing we think we understand, now, and below, I’m going to share with you the framing numbers for this year’s crop of free-agent catchers. You can thank Matthew Carruth and StatCorner.com. I was left to do just the easy work.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some people, surely, are being racist when they draw comparisons between Masahiro Tanaka and Hiroki Kuroda. Some other people, surely, are being not racist, but lazy, failing to look much beyond country of origin. But it is neither automatically racist nor automatically lazy to compare the two starters, because it turns out the comparison is a pretty good one. Masahiro Tanaka has a lot in common with Hiroki Kuroda, and Kuroda has been quite good from the get-go, and Tanaka is entering an offseason in which he might stand to have a higher price tag than Yu Darvish.

What Tanaka doesn’t have is Darvish’s raw stuff. On top of that, he hasn’t put up quite the same numbers in Japan, so there’s a reason people aren’t talking about him as potentially the next best starting pitcher on the planet. But there’s more money in baseball now than there was then, even though “then” wasn’t long ago, and among the teams looking to land an impact starter are some of the richest teams in the league. This isn’t going to be the offseason of Masahiro Tanaka, but it’s going to be the offseason with Masahiro Tanaka, and he ought to be the kind of pitcher who can alter a playoff race.

Read the rest of this entry »