Given the headline I just wrote, there’s no real beating around the bush in this introduction. The Dodgers are reportedly close to re-signing Justin Turner for $64 million over four years. I think he’s worth way more than that, and that the Dodgers just got a huge steal despite shopping in a market bereft of impact talent. So, let’s try to figure out why 29 other MLB teams just let the Dodgers sign Justin Turner on the cheap?
Over the last 10 seasons, home-team batters were intentionally walked 5,813 times. We saw 478 of those in 2016. If you watch enough baseball, you’ve seen several of these on television or in person. In many cases, these walks are met with enthusiastic booing by the home crowd, which is always something I’ve found particularly curious given that being offered a free base is almost always a good thing.
Of course, intentional walks aren’t as valuable as doubles or home runs — and, on average, they occur at times when they’re significantly less valuable than singles. In most cases, however, an intentional walk is better than the expected value of a normal plate appearance. This is why we’ve seen a movement away from intentional walks over the last several years; it’s rarely advantageous for the pitcher.
Given that the evidence seems quite clear that most intentional walks benefit the hitting team, why do fans frequently give the pitcher such a hard time? I see three possible lines of reasoning.
The Houston Astros figure to be one of the better clubs in baseball this next season. They had a strong team last year and have added Carlos Beltran, Brian McCann, and Josh Reddick in the meantime. Presumably, that makes them a stronger team.
As for the pitching side, they don’t appear to be content yet. They have Dallas Keuchel at the front of the rotation. Lance McCullers is good, but had elbow problems last season. Collin McHugh is fine, Mike Fiers a little bit less fine. Charlie Morton and potentially Joe Musgrove also appear in the mix. The team could probably use one more good pitcher.
As such, it should come as no surprise that, according to Brian McTaggart of MLB.com, that the Astros have tried to trade for a starting pitcher. From McTaggart’s piece:
The Astros are trying to land a starting pitcher, but aren’t willing to trade Bregman. That has made things rather difficult. Among some of their targets are Jose Quintana, Jake Odorizzi, Chris Archer, Danny Duffy and Yordano Ventura. The team has the prospects to get a deal done and is likely to make a move at some point.
One of these things is not like the other. Here are those pitchers’ WAR totals from last season.
| 2016 WAR | 2016 RA/9 WAR | AVG | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jose Quintana | 4.8 | 5.8 | 5.3 |
| Danny Duffy | 2.8 | 4.3 | 3.6 |
| Jake Odorizzi | 2.0 | 3.6 | 2.8 |
| Chris Archer | 3.1 | 2.3 | 2.7 |
| Yordano Ventura | 1.5 | 2.3 | 1.9 |
It would certainly appear from the data here as though Yordano Ventura isn’t particularly good. At the very least, you could say he had pretty forgettable season in terms of creating wins. He did incite a benches-clearing brawl earlier in the season — and, after multiple, similar incidents, it’s certainly possible he deserved more than the eight-game suspension he received for throwing at Manny Machado.
So much of what we do is try to tell the future. So much of what we do is get the future wrong! But still we keep on plugging away, with any noteworthy trade, or any noteworthy signing. One noteworthy signing last week reunited the Yankees and Aroldis Chapman, with the closer getting a five-year guarantee. The history of relievers getting long-term deals isn’t great, but one thing we can’t ignore is that Chapman is kind of extraordinary. By some measures he’s even unique. Baseball doesn’t have an extended track record of Aroldis Chapmans (Chapmen?). Projecting his future is tricky, as it always is.
We know that, if Chapman stays the same, he’ll remain nearly unbelievable. That much, he’s proven. We know that he could snap something after any given pitch. That much, countless other pitchers have proven. But what else might we able to say?
One issue that’s come up is imagining Chapman throwing at lower velocities. Every pitcher eventually loses his zip. Some start at 25, and some start at 35, but it’s a guarantee. There’s no getting around it. For Chapman in particular, there’s one positive sign. Last year, his average fastball was 100.4 miles per hour. That’s the highest mark of his career, and he was around 98 in his first full season. So Chapman hasn’t lost anything yet. Maybe he’ll continue to hang around triple digits for a while to come.
Inevitably, though, there will be decline. And what then? To attempt to answer that, I want to try something. How might Chapman perform at lower velocities? Well, we can look at how he’s already performed at lower velocities.
Tables, ahoy! I looked at Chapman’s game log from 2012 to 2016. For every single game, I grabbed Chapman’s average fastball velocity, and then it was a matter of putting numbers together. In this first table, Chapman’s numbers are split into six groups.
| FA Velocity | IP | TBF | K-BB% | H/9 | HR/9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 101+ | 35.7 | 130 | 38% | 3.5 | 0.0 |
| 100 – 100.9 | 75.0 | 305 | 40% | 5.8 | 0.2 |
| 99 – 99.9 | 73.7 | 282 | 36% | 3.7 | 0.4 |
| 98 – 98.9 | 63.0 | 246 | 29% | 5.0 | 0.6 |
| 97 – 97.9 | 32.3 | 128 | 32% | 4.7 | 0.8 |
| Under 97 | 34.0 | 145 | 23% | 6.4 | 1.3 |
That’s fairly informative already, but let’s increase the sample sizes. We’ll do that by condensing from six groups to three.
| FA Velocity | Split | IP | TBF | K-BB% | H/9 | HR/9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100+ | Chapman, High | 110.7 | 435 | 39% | 5.0 | 0.2 |
| 98 – 99.9 | Chapman, Med | 136.7 | 528 | 33% | 4.3 | 0.5 |
| Under 98 | Chapman, Low | 66.3 | 273 | 27% | 5.6 | 1.1 |
Surprise! When Chapman has thrown his hardest, he’s been his best. He hasn’t allowed many hits, and he’s allowed only two home runs. The home-run category here might be the most dramatic, but it’s also the noisiest, since Chapman hasn’t allowed many homers overall. Even when Chapman has worked around 96-97, he’s still been a strikeout machine. For reference, he’s a top-10 table since 2012, looking at strikeout rate minus walk rate. Chapman leads all pitchers, overall, but I took him out and replaced him with the three versions of himself.
| Pitcher | K-BB% |
|---|---|
| Aroldis Chapman, High | 39.3% |
| Edwin Diaz | 33.6% |
| Kenley Jansen | 33.0% |
| Aroldis Chapman, Med | 32.8% |
| Andrew Miller | 32.1% |
| Dellin Betances | 30.9% |
| Craig Kimbrel | 30.8% |
| Koji Uehara | 29.8% |
| Aroldis Chapman, Low | 27.5% |
| Seung Hwan Oh | 27.2% |
The hardest-throwing Chapman is in first, easily. The medium-throwing Chapman is in fourth. The slowest-throwing Chapman is in ninth, out of 776 pitchers. Ken Giles just missed this table. So did Sean Doolittle. And maybe that’s older Chapman: some kind of healthier Sean Doolittle equivalent. Doolittle has sometimes given up his home runs, and he hasn’t been considered one of the highest-tier relievers, but he has been excellent when he’s pitched. So Yankees fans can be somewhat encouraged.
Aroldis Chapman, at some point, will lose some velocity. Aroldis Chapman, at some point, will get worse. But, of course, he has a lot of velocity to give. And when he’s worked at lower speeds before, he’s been only somewhat less incredible. Chapman comes with a lot of what you might consider wiggle room.
We all agree that Kenley Jansen was never going to leave the Dodgers, right? Certainly not after Aroldis Chapman agreed to terms with the Yankees. The Nationals might’ve been a player, but they have their limits. It was almost unimaginable that Jansen could choose to join the Marlins on purpose. As long as the Dodgers were in there, they had to be considered the heavy favorites, and now there’s an agreement in place. All three of the big free-agent closers have signed new contracts in the span of a week.
Mark Melancon is really good, but he just doesn’t work as a comp. Chapman works a lot better, and his deal made these negotiations easy. Chapman and Jansen are basically the same age. They’ve been similarly dominant, and Chapman signed for five years and $86 million, with an opt-out. So Jansen is getting five years and $80 million, with an opt-out, taking a small penalty because Jansen had a draft pick attached. Do you value a pick around $5 – 10 million? Voila! We’re all agents.
While you were off doing something else over the weekend, the Angels picked up a new second baseman. Granted, their new second baseman was to be someone else’s bench player, so we’re not talking about a blockbuster, and that same would-be bench player had just expressed frustration over losing his starting job. And so Danny Espinosa was sent to California, with the Nationals picking up Austin Adams and Kyle McGowin.
You want to know another way to know this wasn’t big? The Nationals made a trade for Angels prospects. As we all understand, the Angels don’t have prospects, and here Adams might be the one who’s slightly interesting. He’s been a tough-to-hit Double-A reliever with significant control problems. The Nationals didn’t get a lot for Espinosa’s final year of team control. The Angels, though, should probably be pretty happy. They’ve plugged what had been a gaping hole, and Espinosa suffers from a perception problem.
Ever since I discovered (for myself, at least) that horizontal direction matters when modeling batted-ball distance, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of ideal spray angle. Every discovery I’ve made along the way has only led to more questions.
For example, it looks like a batter’s ability to pull fly balls ages better than his ability to hit opposite-field fly balls. But that finding is complicated by the fact that the distance of pulled fly balls ages worse than the distance on opposite-field fly balls. Screwed if you pull, screwed if you push: thanks, Father Time.
Now, with the help of Andrew Perpetua, we have a few more graphs to help us better examine the traits of pulled and pushed fly balls. It should provide some answers. And definitely more questions, too.
Last Wednesday, the Nationals solved their center field problem by trading several of their best pitching prospects to the Chicago White Sox in exchange for Adam Eaton. Last Friday, the Cardinals solved their center field problem by giving a bunch of money to free agent Dexter Fowler. Before signing Fowler, the Cardinals tried to trade for Eaton. Had the Nationals not been able to complete a deal for Eaton, they presumably would have been in on Fowler. So, with two teams making different decisions about big investments into how to land a center fielder, let’s compare the two players and the costs it took to acquire them.
About a year and a half ago, Jeff Sullivan wrote an article here in which he imagined the baseball equivalent of LeBron James. It’s a fun piece. Check it out. I’m a sucker for cross-sport comparisons, and I’ve been watching more basketball recently, because basketball is fun. Jeff’s article has stuck with me, because it came out right around when I started reading FanGraphs, and it was such a novel concept. I assume the WAR calculations he makes in it are somewhat accurate, because I’ve found it’s good policy to always assume Jeff is right (or at least entertaining enough to always look like he’s right).
That article popped back into my head this past Thursday for reasons unknown. Then, later that night, DeMar DeRozan did this.
That’s a pretty dunk. As Kevin Harlan so eloquently states, DeRozan basically appeared out of thin air and slammed the ball down over poor Ricky Rubio, who just wanted to collect the rebound.
Now, why are we talking about slam dunks? There are no dunks in baseball, as unfortunate as that is. Everything is better with slam dunks. Dunking is one of the most surefire ways in all of sports to get a crowd to lose its collective mind. It doesn’t inspire the pure pandemonium of a Champions League goal or a walk-off home run, but it creates a damn good highlight.
There’s something awe-inspiring about watching one 6-foot-8 behemoth of athleticism jump over another behemoth and shove a basketball through a hoop. DeRozan’s dunk isn’t even the most conspicuous display of pure one-on-one physical dominance. (For that distinction, I nominate this LeBron highlight.) DeRozan’s is the product a bit more of finesse and court awareness. It’s hard to leap up, grab the ball off the backboard, and slam it down onto Ricky Rubio.
As a baseball writer, I got wondering about how the dunk might translate to my favorite sport. Because the Winter Meetings just ended and there’s been a dearth of blockbuster deals in the meantime (no offense to Dexter Fowler), I decided to write about it.
So, we begin with a question: is there an equivalent of a slam dunk in baseball? To find out, we’d need to boil down what makes a dunk awesome. I just spent a paragraph explaining why they’re cool, but what was I really saying?
Dunks are great because:
Which plays in baseball fit those criteria?
Here it is: the split leaderboards! Now, you can create custom splits using multiple splits, much like you can on the player pages — except now in the form of an entire leaderboard, and accessible directly from the leaderboard menu.
