Archive for Daily Graphings

I recently took a vacation, which meant I recently missed some Mariners trades. The trades weren’t conditional upon me being somewhere else; they were conditional upon the passage of some amount of time. The Mariners subtracted from the pitching staff to add to the outfield. They then subtracted from the outfield to add to the pitching staff. Later, they subtracted from the minors to add Mallex Smith, then they subtracted from Mallex Smith to add Drew Smyly. I was asked last Friday why the latest pair of moves didn’t go down as a three-team maneuver. I don’t know, but, this way, Jerry Dipoto gets to double-add to his tally.

In general, baseball fans are mostly preoccupied with the goings-on surrounding their own favorite teams. Plain and simple, it can be hard to know much about everything else that’s taking place. Dipoto, though, is transcending that, developing an active trader reputation that fewer and fewer can ignore. It’s become a punchline, Dipoto sometimes resembling a caricature of himself. It’s tempting to compare Dipoto to a hummingbird, but as luck would have it, a hummingbird has recently taken up temporary residence outside our bedroom window. A picture:

Even a hummingbird can sometimes be seen sitting still.

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Our position-by-position look at hitter contact quality using granular exit speed and launch angle data grinds on. Last time, it was National League left fielders; this time, American League center fielders. There isn’t much doubt as to the greatness of Mike Trout, but if you wanted to sum it up in one article, this might be the one. There are other great hitters in the game, likely one or two at least fractionally better than the pride of South Jersey, but once you take positional effects into account, well… read on.

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It’s no secret the Royals have been facing a challenging offseason. They came in with so many critical players entering their contract years, and they’re also a lower-budget operation with a mediocre farm system. A month and a half ago, I wrote an article entitled “The Royals’ Last Ride.” Some sort of transition appeared inevitable. The Royals would need to work incredibly hard if they wanted to have a chance to win down the line, without sacrificing too much from 2017.

Now, there’s plenty to like about how the transition has gone. The overall situation is still difficult, to be sure, but the Royals got four years of Jorge Soler for one year of Wade Davis. They got four years of Nate Karns for one year of Jarrod Dyson. And now, maybe most significantly, the team has extended Danny Duffy, with a five-year deal covering four years of would-be free agency. Duffy is the best starting pitcher in the organization. He has it in him to be one of the better starting pitchers in the league.

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Of course it’s true that major league teams want to find a young player to fill the shoes of an older player, all other things being equal. The younger player has more upside, and is likely to be cheaper. So of course, despite the fact that Brandon Moss has been a top-fifteen slugger over the last five years, of course teams would rather find the next Moss. It’s probably not that easy, though.

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In 1972, the Washington Senators packed up and moved down to Texas to become the Rangers. In the 45 years since the Senators’ departure, however, only a single other Major League Baseball franchise has relocated: the Montreal Expos (owned by MLB at the time) moved to Washington before the 2005 season and became the Nationals.

During that same 45-year period, meanwhile, the National Football League has seen the relocation of franchises on nine occasions (10 if Oakland completes their move to Las Vegas). The National Hockey League has featured nine moves of their own (including one merger); the NBA, eight.

There are quite a few reasons for MLB’s stability relative to the other leagues, including antitrust protection, willing local governments, and a little bit more patience when it comes to stadium issues. And baseball hasn’t always possessed such geographic consistency. Consider: the creation of the Rangers actually marked the end of a 20-year period that saw quite a bit of movement throughout Major League Baseball. Rarely did a move leave a city without a franchise — and for those cities left without teams, all had new teams in short order — but there was activity nonetheless. The graph below illustrates MLB’s history of relocation and expansion.

From 1903 to 1953, the league featured all the same clubs without change. In the early 50s, however, three different two-team cities lost the weaker of their clubs, as the Boston Braves, Philadelphia Athletics, and St. Louis Browns moved to towns without franchises. An even more notable exodus occurred when the Dodgers and Giants left New York for California. As populations shifted, it was only natural for baseball to move westward.

The Yankees had New York to themselves for just four seasons before MLB approved the creation of the Mets. The addition of a franchise in Houston marked the first baseball club in Texas. When Washington moved to Minnesota, the league gave the nation’s capital a new team without missing a single season. After Milwaukee moved to Atlanta, Kansas City moved to Oakland, and the brand new Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee following Bud Selig’s purchase of the team, MLB found new franchises for those cities, Seattle’s seven-year wait marking the longest.

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It’s that time of year again! This past Friday was the filing deadline for arbitration-eligible player contract offers. Once these numbers are published, I like to create a data visualization showing the difference between the team and player contract filings. (See the 2016 version here.) If you are unfamiliar with the arbitration process here’s the quick explanation from last year:

Teams and players file salary figures for one-year contracts, then an arbitration panel awards the player either with the contract offered by the team or the contract for which the player filed. More details of the arbitration process can be found here. Most players will sign a contract before numbers are exchanged or before the hearing, so only a handful of players actually go through the entire arbitration process each year.

The compiled team and player contract-filings data used in the graph can be found at MLB Trade Rumors.

Three colored dots represent a different type of signing: yellow represents a mutually-agreed contract signed to avoid arbitration, red represents the award of the team’s offer in arbitration, and blue represents the award of the player’s offer. A gray line represents the difference in player and team filings. Only players with whom teams exchanged numbers on January 13, 2017 will have grey lines. These can be filtered by clicking the “Filed” button.

The “Signed” button filters out players who have signed a contract for 2017; this will change as arbitration hearings occur. Finally, “All” includes every player represented in the graph. This year Jake Arrieta and Bryce Harper had the two largest contracts ($15.367M and $13.625M, respectively), but they both signed contracts before the filing deadline. This causes changes on the x-axis scale on the “Signed” and “All” tabs compared to the “Filed” tab, which is scaled to contracts under $10M.

The chart is sorted either by contract value or by the midpoint of the arbitration filings. The midpoint is the average of the two contracts and determines which contract the arbitrator awards based on his assessment of the relevant player’s value. The final contract value takes precedent over the midpoint since this represents the resolved value. Contract extension details will be written out over the data points. For our purposes, an extension is a multiyear deal that can’t be shown on the graph, since we are looking only single-year contracts for 2017.

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The signing of Eric Thames and the projections subsequently produced for him represent two of the more interesting, if lower-profile, developments of the offseason. Since Thames took his quick left-handed swing across the Pacific, he’s become one of the top sluggers in the hitter-friendly Korea Baseball Organization.

If you have 30 free minutes you can watch all 47 of his 2015 home runs thanks to YouTube:

Despite having already played in the majors, Thames is something of a mystery, a curiosity, in transitioning from a foreign professional league. If the projections are accurate, however – and his Davenport translations are pretty close to other, former international unknowns like Jose Abreu, Yoenis Cespedes and Jung Ho Kang – then the Brewers have themselves a steal.

In the cases both of Cespedes and Kang, who played in foreign leagues that draw fewer scouts, analytics played a considerable role in the decision to sign them. Analytics and projections also played a significant part in the Thames signing, as Brewers GM David Stearns told David Laurila in the latter’s Sunday notes this weekend.

Kang was the first KBO hitter to make the jump directly to the majors. There were no direct comparisons. But plenty of South Korean stars had played in the Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball Organization, so the Pirates looked at their production in Japan and then studied the more sizable sample of NPB position players who have played in the majors.

Back in 2013, the A’s were also creative in projecting Cespedes, then a trailblazing Cuban defector, as detailed by Ben Reiter in Sports Illustrated.

“[Farhan] Zaidi built a model that analyzed not just the grades the scouts had given to Cespedes on the usual eight-point scale, but also the scouts themselves. Say three guys have a six power on him, three guys have seven power on him. What kind of minor leaguers or major leaguers do those guys have those grades on?”

The A’s did not miss a chance to scout Cespedes when access was available. The Pirates did send scouts over to evaluate Kang in addition to video analysis (though Kang’s off-the-field issues were apparently not discovered). Still, recent success stories of players signed from foreign pro leagues are analytics-heavy because they’ve had to be. There are few scouting resources committed to South Korea and Japan. Cuba has been difficult to scout due to political reasons.

But what are MLB clubs missing at the professional and amateur levels by not having more of a scouting presence in places like South Korea? And why are such areas not heavily staffed?

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Football — what we Americans call soccer — rules Scotland’s sporting scene. Rugby runs a distant second, while golf, which was invented in St. Andrews, probably ranks third in terms of popularity.

Baseball barely registers a blip in the country’s sporting consciousness. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t played there. An organization called Baseball Scotland is keeping it alive, with hopes of increasing both interest and participation.

I learned more from one of its members while I was in Glasgow over the holidays.

Xander Harrison, a 24-year-old financial services analyst, plays for the Glasgow Comets. Over pints of Tennent’s Lager at a City Centre watering hole, Harrison told me that Baseball Scotland was formed in 2007 by the Edinburgh baseball club, which previously had teams in the British Baseball Federation, but had become disgruntled with the league organization and costs. There had also been a recognized BBF Scotland Division, and before that a Scotland Division in the old British Baseball League.

There is no organized baseball in the Scottish school system. Harrison began playing around the age 11, when he joined a youth league formed by the Glasgow Baseball Association. His team — one of eight in the league at the time— was the White Sox. That led to his becoming a fan of Chicago’s South Side club. Read the rest of this entry »

As the long dormant Hot Stove season shows signs of flickering to life, we continue our position-by-position look at hitter contact quality. Last week, we looked at a rather moribund group of AL left fielders; today, it’s their NL counterparts, whose 2016 production was much more significant. As a reminder, we’re utilizing granular exit-speed and launch-angle data to measure how position players “should have” performed in comparison to their actual stat lines.

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One of the great things about FIP, in my estimation, is the ease with which one can understand its value. If you’re watching a pitcher for your preferred team and ask yourself “What outcome would bother me the most right here?” a home run is the clear answer. A walk is second. A single, double, or triple isn’t ideal, of course. In the case of every ball in play, though, there’s at least some chance for the defense to make a play. The walk and home run don’t allow that. They are, almost uniformly, decisively negative.

Conversely, a strikeout is generally the best outcome for a pitcher*. A batter who strikes out create no opportunity for value.

*Outside of a double play, of course. That requires a runner at first and less than two outs, though, something that happens less than 20% of the time.

What FIP does is to take those three outcomes and transform them into a pitching stat that’s consistent from year to year and better predicts future ERA than ERA itself does. One thing for which FIP doesn’t account, though, is all of those balls that are hit into play.

Or maybe it does.

We know that a pitcher exerts a decent amount of control over the types of batted balls he concedes. He might be a ground-ball pitcher, a fly-ball pitcher or a mix of both. Newer data pushes us closer to the conclusion that a pitcher has some control over how hard a ball is hit, as well — although most of the control does appear to come from the batter.

Statcast has given us the ability to help reach those conclusions. The graph below comes from the work of Sean Dolinar and Jonah Epstein — you can play around with their tool here — and illustrates the degree to which a pitcher’s observed launch angle and exit velocity represents his true-talent launch angle and exit velocity.

As you can see, there’s more hope for arriving at something like “true-talent” launch angle. And this makes sense: as noted above, we talk frequently about “ground-ball” and “fly-ball” pitchers. Grounders and flies are expressions of a pitcher’s control over launch angle. The relationship between a pitcher and his exit velocity is a bit more speculative, though.

Yesterday, I discussed how there was a detectable relationship between those two variables even looking at one year compared to the next. We also have a relationship (as discussed yesterday) between exit velocity and FIP, even if there’s also a decent bit of noise in there.

To see how the relationship with FIP works, it might be helpful to break down the components of FIP. The chart below depicts the correlation coefficient between average exit velocity and HR/9, BB/9, and K/9 for 186 single-seasons from 2015 and 2016 for the 93 pitchers who recorded more than 100 innings in both years.

While it’s possible that there’s some sort of relationship between strikeouts, walks, and exit velocity, that relationship doesn’t easily present itself in the data above. Where there does seem to be some sort of relationship is in home runs. Now let’s take a look at three groups from 2016: those with a high average exit velocity, those with a low average exit velocity, and a large group in the middle.

While the relationship between exit velocity and both strikeout and walk numbers appears to offer some promise, it might be better to consider them more deeply on another day. Not only is the coefficient lower for both those variables than for home runs, but strikeouts and walks exert less of an overall effect over FIP than homers.

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