If one were willing to go out on a limb, one might say that Blue Jays’ catcher J.P. Arencibia did not have the best year. Sure, he hit 21 home runs and, well, that is about it. With the rumor mill firing up in anticipation getting into full swing after the World Series, word has it that the Blue Jays are interested in acquiring one of the Angels’ catchers: either Chris Iannetta or Hank Conger.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about some interesting platoon splits of a couple of left-handed hitters who had my attention. When I started looking at some right-handed hitters who had splits I wanted to discuss, they also turned out to be players with a big impact this year: the winner of the 2013 National League batting title, the most exciting young player in years, and the hero of last night’s NLCS game. Their splits are interesting in themselves (at least to a certain type of baseball fan), but also are concrete way of thinking about more general principles with respect to platoon skill.
Look at the numbers for Robert Coello’s third pitch and you might not get it. It’s a forkball. It gets a below-average swinging-strike rate for a breaking pitch. It’s a ball half the time. It looks flawed. But then you watch Coello pitch, and this happens.
You won’t get Mike Trout to say he should win the Most Valuable Player award this year because his Wins Above Replacement total is higher than another player’s. But if you listen closely to him describing his game, you will hear the basic constructs for the argument that can be made in his favor. It’s a simple one.
Episode 375
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses the mediocrity of the LA Angels and the consequences of same.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
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Over the weekend, various reports have emerged suggesting that the Angels are likely to fire either GM Jerry DiPoto or longtime manager Mike Scioscia in the wake of their disastrous 2013 season. While Scioscia denies that there is an abnormal rift between the field staff and the front office, there’s enough smoke here to believe that there is a fire somewhere, and it would actually be unusual if someone wasn’t held responsible for a $140 million failure.
Firing decision makers as a response to poor performance is standard operating procedure in Major League Baseball, and the GM and manager are the two guys whose job descriptions include taking responsibility for the results on the field. Both DiPoto and Scioscia know how this game works, and neither one would have much of a right to be surprised if they were let go following the season. However, if the Angels actually want to fix what is broken, they should be more interested in figuring out what went wrong and why rather than just meting out punishment to satisfy the desire to hold someone accountable.
So, what happened to the 2013 Angels? How can a team with the best young player the game has seen in 100 years still manage to be so awful?
In the beginning, there was Jose Molina. For real though, he’s really old. Molina hung around, and then baseball was invented, and then people figured out how to measure catcher pitch-framing, and then, initially, Molina really shined. Molina’s numbers blew everyone else’s out of the water, and so Molina became something of a cult favorite, and so on and so forth. You know how this story has gone. You know how Molina has become sort of popular, and you know how Molina is playing a lot for a contending team. Molina’s still really great at framing. It’s probably what he’s most great at.
Over time, I myself started to champion Jonathan Lucroy. Not because I thought Lucroy was better than Molina, but because I thought the two were roughly equivalent, and Lucroy didn’t get enough attention or respect. It seems to me Lucroy is one of baseball’s more underrated all-around players, and even still this year, Lucroy has been helping the Brewers’ pitching staff suck just a little less than it might otherwise. Lucroy’s still good, of course. Molina’s still good, of course. One doesn’t simply forget how to frame. But I was surprised when I took a peek at the 2013 pitch-framing leaderboards.
This post is analysis free. It’s just a list followed by amazement. Here are the best hitters (by wRC+) through their age-21 season, all time.
The FanGraphs staff made its obligatory preseason picks before the season (naturally), and I think it’s safe to say that none of us have psychic powers. My picks of the Angels and Blue Jays to win their divisions — they’re not looking so hot right now. In my defense, I was just blindly going along with what our preseason WAR estimates told me. OK, not the greatest defense, but I figured Steamer + ZiPS + FG-created depth charts could produce better guesses than I could on my own. Especially with the roster changes that have happened lately, I thought it would be a good time to revisit our projections. The Angels came up the series victors against the Blue Jays in their recent four-game Battle of the Disappointments, but both teams are still far below the expectations put on them. However, let’s examine: could they actually be good teams who have just been unlucky?
Most teams have played somewhere around 110 games this season. That leaves plenty of room for unpredictability. If you flipped a coin 110 times, you’d expect to get about 55 heads, right? Well, the binomial distribution says there’s only about a 49.5% chance of the heads total being within even three of that (somewhere between 52 and 58 times). MLB teams are pretty different from coins — they’re a lot more expensive — but I think you can apply the same principle to them. The above calculation for the coin assumes the “true” rate of heads is 50%. What would we see if we were to presume our projections’ estimated preseason win totals are actually representative of the “true” win rates for each team? The following table will show you: Read the rest of this entry »
Last year, the AL MVP debate turned into something resembling a culture war, with Miguel Cabrera representing the traditional methods of player evaluation while Mike Trout was the darling of the sabermetric community. In the final tally, Cabrera won in a landslide, receiving 22 of the 28 first place votes, but Trout and Cabrera were #1 and #2 on 27 of the 28 ballots submitted, with Trout sliding to third on just one ballot. While there was disagreement over which of the two was more valuable, there was broad consensus that they represented a tier unto themselves, with everyone else looking up to their excellence.
Well, it’s happening again. If you pull up the leaderboard for American League hitters, there’s Mike Trout at #1 (+6.9 WAR), followed more closely than last year by Miguel Cabrera at #2 (+6.4 WAR). While Trout blew away the field by WAR last year, Cabrera’s having an even better season in 2013 than he did a year ago, while Trout is just a little shy of last year’s remarkable pace. This year, instead of the big gap in WAR being between Trout and Cabrera, the gap is between Trout/Cabrera and everyone else; Chris Davis, at +5.1 WAR, is a distant third.