It might be surprising, but there’s one thing Joey Votto isn’t good at. Well, to be more precise, there’s one thing that Joey Votto doesn’t think he’s good at. He’s done a lot of work, and it looks like he’s good at it. When it comes to defense, though, he credits the work and not any natural ability. And then last year happened, so maybe he’s not so good at it, after all.

That’s Votto’s rolling UZR per 150 games since 2008. UZR requires a large sample to become reliable, so any single year of data needs to be regressed heavily. But there appears to be a trend here. In any case, I’m apparently not the first to notice a downturn in Votto’s defensive ability last year, nor to mention it to him. “It’s hard to ignore when people ask you on a consistent basis about it,” he grimaced when I asked.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two balls and no strikes, one ball and no strikes — those are the counts that are called hitter’s counts. Pitchers are forced into a predictable corner, since they have to get back into the count, and are more likely to throw a fastball so they can put it in the strike zone. They have to come into the zone, at least, and that’s always better for the hitter. Some of these things are true, and important to the lesson the 23-year-old Cody Reed is currently trying to learn from 28-year-old former teammate Dan Straily. Some of these things are also not true.

Read the rest of this entry »

The news is in. As Rob Bradford reported late last week, Boston lefty David Price will only miss seven to ten days with an elbow strain and won’t require surgery for the moment. That’s fortunate for the Red Sox, as the loss of Price would immediately have tested the club’s somewhat suspect depth.

Before news of Price’s injury surfaced, I was looking at his 2016 campaign to see what was amiss. It looks like the cutter was a big part of the problem. Given what happened on that pitch, and the information we now possess about Price’s elbow, it’s possible we can understand Price’s 2016 season much better.

Read the rest of this entry »

As if being a 27-year old rookie weren’t hard enough, Ryan Schimpf went at things in an unprecedented way last season. While the fighter — schimpf literally means “to curse and fight” in German — probably established himself as a useful major leaguer with a couple of important tools, regression will come for a player with such an extreme batted-ball mix.

Since we started recording these things, no batter has ever had a qualified season during which he hit fewer than four grounders for every 10 fly balls. Schimpf hit three for every 10 in his debut last year. Even if you relax the entry to 300 plate appearances, the San Diego second baseman is an outlier — only one person has ever recorded a higher fly-ball rate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s rare that the scouting community, projections wonks, and enthusiastic fans all possess more or less the same opinion about a player. More commonly, a player comes up and drives some kind of wedge between certain crowds. So Dan Vogelbach, guy who fans like more than scouts, isn’t necessarily rare in that regard. In Vogelbach’s case, however, the difference of opinion are more pronounced. And in Vogelbach’s case, the stakes are higher — in more ways than one.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the thing about bunting: it can be a good idea if the third baseman is playing too far back. The chance of a hit goes up in that case, and a successful bunt often causes the third baseman to play more shallow in future plate appearances, so future balls in play receive a benefit. That’s one of those games within a game we see all the time in baseball: once the positioning deviates from “normal” by a certain degree, the batter receives a benefit. Then the defender has to change his approach.

This tension created by the bunt illustrates how offenses and defenses react to each other’s tendencies. That same sort of balance between fielder and hitter might be playing out on an even broader scale, however, when it comes to the shift in general.

Too many shifts in the game, and the players begin to adjust. They develop more of a two-strike approach, they find a way to put the ball in play on the ground the other way, or they make sure that they lift the ball if they’re going to pull it. There’s evidence that players are already working on lifting the ball more as a group, pulling the ball in the air more often than they have in five years, and have improved on hitting opposite-field ground balls. So maybe this next table is no surprise.

The league has improved against the shift! The shift is dead! Or, wait: the league has actually improved as a whole over this timeframe, and the difference between the two is still about the same. And every team would take a .292 wOBA against over a .297 number. Long live the shift.

Read the rest of this entry »

Perspective matters a great deal when you’re trying to look at a question and find the unfiltered truth. It’s true of all statistical analysis, but it becomes even more obvious when you’re trying to find comparable historical players.

Where do you set the cutoffs? How far back do you go in the player pool? How far back do you go in the player’s own career? If you manipulate the variables, you can get all sorts of different results. That’s why it’s so hard to analyze a player simply by finding other, similar players. The very idea of similar is difficult to pin down.

Take Yasiel Puig, for example. Pull the strings a little differently each time, and his comps vary wildly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

In baseball, luck is a tricky concept. In some cases, it’s used to describe an event that’s within the normal distribution of outcomes but far from the mean. In other cases, what we call luck might actually be the first signs of an outlying skill for which we simply lack a sufficiently large sample to identify.

We’ve developed a new understanding on one kind of luck in recent years — namely, the sort that occurs with a batted ball. With Statcast data, we can look at the shape and size of a ball in play and try to decide what the batter “deserved” from that sort of ball in play. Then we compare it to actual outcomes. The difference between the observed and expected outcome is luck.

What if you want to look at a luck on a specific pitch type, though? How would you do it? You could look at the results on the pitch and basically use the Statcast-type process from the other side of the ball. What sorts of balls in play did that pitch produce, and what sort of results should those balls in play have produced? The problem with that approach is that you’re slicing a pitcher’s repertoire into small samples when you start talking about balls in play off a specific pitch. Even David Price, for example — who led the majors in innings last year — allowed fewer than 300 balls in play on his most frequently thrown pitch, the fastball. Secondary pitches are, almost by definition, thrown much less often. Variance isn’t the exception in such cases, but the rule.

Read the rest of this entry »