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Assorted Quick Thoughts on Opening Day No. 2
Sunday was the beginning of the 2013 MLB regular season, and it kicked off with a bang, as the Astros bombed the Rangers and we all learned a lesson about the real value of a one-game playoff. Not like the stakes were the same, so the game was managed differently from how it could’ve been, but in any one given game, a team like the Houston Astros can beat a team unlike the Houston Astros. Of course, it should be noted that the difference between the Astros and the best team in baseball might be like the difference between a city’s best restaurant and a city’s 29th or 30th best restaurant. That 29th or 30th best restaurant is probably still a very good restaurant! It’s just outclassed relative to the elite. It still beats the hell out of Hardee’s.
Monday is more of a baseball extravaganza, with several games on the schedule, none of which involve the Astros. Monday feels more like a true opening day, and below, I’ve assembled some quick thoughts based on some of the early games. I didn’t watch a single inning from spring training so, for me personally, baseball couldn’t feel more fresh. It will feel like this for the rest of the day, and then tomorrow, it will feel like baseball as usual. Savor the feeling of today, or tomorrow.
Justin Verlander Summits Money Mountain
For much of the offseason, Felix Hernandez, Justin Verlander, and Clayton Kershaw were non-literally linked. All three have been among the most consistently outstanding starting pitchers in the world entire. All three were to enter 2013 two years away from free agency. So all three were to entertain thoughts of signing long-term contract extensions. Felix signed first, re-upping with the Mariners for the rest of days. Now, Friday, with the season just about upon us, Verlander has signed second, re-upping with the Tigers for several days himself.
Depending on how you think about things, Verlander has signed either a seven-year contract or a five-year contract. Verlander was already under contract for $20 million in each of the next two seasons, but upon the new agreement some of the language concerning those two seasons has changed. In any case, after Verlander makes $20 million a year for two years, he’ll make $28 million a year for five. The breakdown:
Letting and Not Letting Them Pull
Sam Miller wrote recently about how almost everything he writes serves to lead to a fun fact (or a “factoid”). Sam is one of my favorite writers, and one of my biggest ongoing influences, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m much the same way. Most of the time, I write about fun facts, and the words just dress the facts up. Sometimes they make the facts look nicer, and sometimes they just get in the way. Right now, they’re getting in the way. I just have some facts for you, and then I’ll shut up.
Not all balls in play are created equal. Of course, there are bunts, grounders, liners, and flies, and fliners too if you want to be obnoxious about it. But if you want to bucket balls in play differently, there are pulled balls, balls up the middle, and balls to the opposite field. These categorizations get less attention, but they can be pretty significant. How a guy’s balls in play are distributed can tell you something about how he’d fit in a certain park. And pulled balls tend to do a lot more damage than not-pulled balls. Intuitively, we know this to be true; looking at the numbers, we also know this to be true.
The Unthinkably Exceptional Scott Kazmir
Wouldn’t you know it, but Scott Kazmir is relevant again. Jeremy Bonderman is relevant again, too, and that’s also amazing, but Kazmir’s actually got himself a big-league rotation job and that gives me an opportunity to talk about an incredible Kazmir fun fact. I could’ve talked about it anyway, even if Kazmir were completely off the radar, but now it’ll be less insignificant. You’re thinking about Scott Kazmir, and here’s another thing to think about him.
Pitching with the bases empty is different from pitching with at least one runner on. For many pitchers, the delivery changes, and of course the situation and the intensity changes. The defense changes. Things change when there are people on base, so it can be informative to look at the base-state splits. In such situations it’s always important to remain aware of small sample sizes, but when you get to talking about whole careers, those concerns by and large go away.
Spring Training: Not Not Serious Business
Two stories for you, one shorter than the other: Not long ago, much of the FanGraphs staff was down in Arizona, and on one particular Friday night a lot of us went over to Peoria to watch the Mariners play an exhibition game against the Kingdom of the Netherlands. There was absolutely nothing at stake, although I suppose you could argue Jon Garland was sort of pitching for a job. Anyhow, it was a friendly, but somewhere in the early innings the Dutch dugout started to chirp about a questionable call. The first-base umpire basically paused the game so that he could shout at the dugout and tell them to shut up. This was a quiet exhibition and the ballpark was otherwise pretty silent, so, yeah, that was weird and audible. Tempers flared in a nothing baseball game.
Wednesday afternoon, the Mariners played a Cactus League game against I don’t remember who. It doesn’t matter. What matters, for our purposes, is that Eric Wedge got ejected. The Mariners’ manager was ejected from a pointless competition. Maybe the umpire was a little too hasty or aggressive, but there was some sort of provocation. Again, tempers flared in a nothing baseball game.
On the Consequences of the New Balk Rule
On an individual-player basis, I think we can all agree that spring-training statistics suck. If you’re a reader of FanGraphs, or if you’ve even just heard of FanGraphs, you probably understand that these numbers aren’t predictive. Oh, we’ll always allow ourselves to trick ourselves. Giants fans will allow themselves to believe in Brandon Belt, and Mariners fans will allow themselves to believe in Justin Smoak. We can always trick ourselves to believe in the positive while dismissing the negative. But, guns to our heads, we’d all say “Ahh! Put that gun down!” And then we’d acknowledge that, truthfully, even the positive numbers probably don’t mean much.
But now consider spring-training statistics as a group, as a whole. What is spring training but a whole bunch of baseball games between high-level professionals? What are the numbers but reflections of what took place on the field during ordinary baseball games? Just because the numbers probably won’t tell you much about what will happen doesn’t mean they don’t tell you what has happened. That is precisely what they do. And for our purposes here, we can make use of overall, league-wide spring-training statistics.
R.A. Dickey and Facing the Enemy
Not all that long ago, I wrote about Gio Gonzalez striking out a ton of opposing pitchers. Though Gonzalez set a modern-day record, the achievement itself was not entirely surprising: Gonzalez is a durable pitcher who gets a lot of strikeouts, and pitchers strike out a lot as batters. This is because pitchers are by and large terrible batters, dragging down the offensive numbers of the National League. What was more surprising, to me, was something I noticed about R.A. Dickey, which I included in the post as a note.
Dickey is a knuckleballer, and the league’s only knuckleballer worth a damn. He became a regular with the Mets in 2010, and as a Met, he threw more than 600 innings. Over that span, Dickey faced 2,344 non-pitchers, and he struck out 19% of them, or at least 19% of the guys who didn’t sac bunt. Over the same span, Dickey faced 172 pitchers, and he struck out 17% of them, or at least 17% of the guys who didn’t sac bunt. In other words: with the Mets, R.A. Dickey struck out a lower rate of pitchers than position players.
Jose Molina on Jose Molina
Fun fact: Jose Molina‘s FanGraphs player ID number is 25. Mike Trout’s is 10155. All right.
According to numbers provided to me by Matthew Carruth, last year there were 78 catchers in baseball who caught at least 1,000 called pitches. Carruth defines his strike zone not by the rule book, but by an average of the strike zones big-league umpires actually call. Out of those 78 catchers, Molina posted the fifth-lowest rate of pitches in the zone called balls. Molina tied for the second-highest rate of pitches out of the zone called strikes. Overall, Molina posted the highest rate of extra strikes per game, at +2.5. The other guys over 2 were David Ross, Chris Stewart, and Jonathan Lucroy. Molina caught more than 6,000 called pitches. We’ve had an idea for some time now that Jose Molina is an expert pitch-framer.