Read the rest of this entry »

You don’t need numbers to gain a sense of how Adam Wainwright’s season has started. You just need Adam Wainwright postgame quotes. After his Opening Day start, he wasn’t “anywhere close to being excited,” and called himself “the definition of average.” The next start tied his “career-high-of frustration level” because he was “so upset about the way the ball [was] coming out.” After start number three, he postulated that he’d “made more mistakes these first three games than [he had in] entire seasons.” Start four: “still not great” and “getting tired of losing.” Following his penultimate outing: “The only way I can move on from that is I have to start over. It’s a new season for me from now on.”

That’s a brief rundown of the first eight starts of Adam Wainwright’s 2016 season, in words. I said you didn’t need the numbers, but now you’re going to get them anyway. Through those eight outings, Wainwright ran a 6.80 ERA. The FIP was better, but still a below-average 4.32, and the expected FIP even worse than that. The strikeouts were way down from what we’ve come to expect, the walks were up, and too many balls were being put in the air and leaving the yard. It was the worst stretch of eight games that Wainwright had had in nearly a decade.

Wainwright being 34, and his arm having had the number of surgeries it’s had, a start to a season like that raises some questions. It raises some questions that would be tough to ask to Wainwright’s face. He probably didn’t care about the questions, but he still wanted to give some answers to make the questions stop. Consider his most recent start like the beginning of an answer.

As far as professional athletes go, Wainwright is notably candid. If his stuff isn’t good, even in a win, he’s going to say his stuff wasn’t good. A couple of those negative quotes from the first paragraph came after victories. He doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to his opinion of how he pitched. The key quote following his most recent outing: “I’m dangerous. You can say I’m dangerous again.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Think about everything you’ve ever heard about team chemistry. People say it’s an important thing, maybe the most important thing, but it’s impossible to put any numbers to. So let’s put some numbers to it.

Those are numbers. Those are your numbers, in fact. I guess you could say those are technically bars, which represent numbers, but, you know what I mean. And, you’re responsible for what you’re looking at. I polled you guys on Tuesday. That’s the meat of the outcome. Congratulations, Cubs. Sorry about your clubhouse, Atlanta.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jackie Bradley Jr. has been doing amazing things. To be absolutely clear, they’ve all been doing amazing things. Every last one of them. That 91 mile-per-hour sinker outside? Amazing. That opposite-field roller past the shortstop? Amazing. The reason we bother to pay attention in the first place is because everything that happens out there is amazing, performed by amazing players. Yet Bradley has been particularly amazing. Here’s an amazing thing from yesterday:

Bradley is riding a long hitting streak, and while we don’t really care too much about hitting streaks, on their own, they’re tightly correlated to good offense. That’s what we do care about. This year, Bradley ranks eighth in baseball in wRC+, between Manny Machado and Nick Castellanos. Of course, some things still look a little weird — Aledmys Diaz, for example, ranks second. So looking over the past calendar year, Bradley ranks 15th. That covers 401 trips to the plate, and he’s sandwiched between Machado and Nelson Cruz. Regardless of whether this is for real, Bradley is now definitely a hitter. And in this season, he seems to have taken one more step.

Read the rest of this entry »

Harrison Bader is raking in his first full season of pro ball. The 21-year-old St. Louis Cardinals outfield prospect ranks second in the Double-A Texas League with a .351 batting average. Batting leadoff for Springfield, Bader boasts a .401 OBP and his slugging percentage is a sporty .554.

Last year, he hit the ground running after being drafted in the third round out of the University of Florida. Splitting his debut campaign between the New York-Penn and Midwest Leagues, the Bronxville, New York native put up an .891 OPS. This year he’s been even better, which he partly attributes to being a sponge.

Bader talked about his approach to the game, including his insatiable thirst for knowledge, earlier this week.

———

Bader on how he identifies as a hitter: “I don’t see myself as a power guy. Not by any means. I think that’s evident from where I’m batting in the lineup at this level. I’m a leadoff hitter, so I’m expected to get on base as often as possible. I’m expected to work a lot of counts, have a high level of plate discipline and a good understanding of the strike zone. I also need to know my hitting zone, where I can do damage.

Read the rest of this entry »

The introduction of granular ball-in-play data has changed baseball analysis in numerous ways. While traditional methods of evaluation remain invaluable, they can now be supplemented by hard data that can explain what our eyes are telling us, just as our eyes can at times help explain the numbers.

Park factors have been a part of baseball analysis for at least a generation now. Some versions are calculated very simply, others are much more complex. Most would agree that a single year is way too little data upon which to generate meaningful park factors; rolling three- or four-year metrics are often utilized.

Well, I would submit that there is a lot we can learn from park factors generated over very short periods of time, provided that granular exit speed and angle data is integrated. Today, let’s look at some fairly crude context-adjusted park factors based on data from opening day through May 11 of this season.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s May 19th, and the Phillies are in first second place in the National League East. Yes, the Phillies. The team that generated a 1,000 “tanking is ruining the sport” articles this winter has, six weeks into the season, the third-best record in the National League. As Jeff Sullivan noted this morning, their remarkably excellent bullpen has been one of the primary drivers of the early success, with David Hernandez and Hector Neris surprisingly emerging as dominant forces in the middle innings, and Jeanmar Gomez driving another nail into the coffin of the necessity of a “proven closer”. And yet, despite being in second place at this point, if you look at our current playoff odds, you wouldn’t actually know that the Phillies are off to a great start.

See that flat line across the bottom? That’s the Phillies. Their 24-17 start hasn’t moved the needle, at all, on our forecasts expectations for their chances of reaching the postseason. Okay, that’s not exactly true; they’ve gone from a 0.1% chance of winning one of the two Wild Card spots in our preseason forecast all the way up to a 0.3% chance of getting to the play-in game now. But their odds of hanging on to the NL East? Still close enough zero to round down when displaying one decimal point.

This is, to some, puzzling. A question in my chat yesterday brought up the point that our system is far more bearish on the Phillies hot start leading to postseason success than others; Baseball Prospectus gives them a 2.3% chance of winning the division and a 7.6% chance of getting a Wild Card spot, for 10% overall odds of reaching the playoffs. FiveThirtyEight is even more bullish than that, putting them at 4% to win the NL East and 13% to reach the postseason. So why is our system so stubborn relative to others attempting to look into the same crystal ball in order to see what the final standings will look like in October?

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the wealth of new Statcast data that’s entered the public sphere over the last two seasons — including information on batted-ball exit velocity, direction, and location, as well as this year’s rollout of previously unavailable launch-angle data — the metrics we currently use to evaluate hitters are not the same metrics we’ll be using to evaluate hitters, say, 10 years from now. We’ll need several years of complete Statcast data, at least, before people much smarter than myself can start devising these metrics with any sort of confidence, but that won’t stop us from playing make believe until we have them.

The more I thought about the idea behind this post, which was originally intended to be trivial in nature — just looking at some of the season’s more unique singles — the more I realized there was to it. That’s not to say this is any sort of groundbreaking work — there are no major findings in what’s to follow, and in fact there aren’t any findings at all. But a simple base hit recently reminded me of how close we are to the next leap of better understanding the game. In the time it takes to get through this post, we’re just going to watch some clips, and think about those clips and what they may mean, and dream on the future. Nothing wrong with any of that.

I was watching a baseball game the other night and a player hit a baseball with a bat. That’s gonna happen. The player was Yan Gomes, and he hit the baseball like this:

Now, that type of hit is called a single. It’s been called a single for more than 100 years, and it’s still called a single now. It’s a single according to batting average, it’s a single according to total bases, it’s a single according to OPS, it’s a single according to wOBA and wRC+, it’s a single according to WAR. A single. No more, no less.

Y’know what else is a single? This is a single:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Phillies won again on Wednesday. So this is already off to a silly start, but anyhow, here’s more or less how they did it.

When you allow two runs, you don’t have to do much at the plate to win, and though the Phillies never do much at the plate, they did enough against Tom Koehler to make a winner out of Jeremy Hellickson. Hellickson gave way to David Hernandez, who turned in a scoreless inning. Hernandez gave way to Hector Neris, who turned in a scoreless inning. And Neris gave way to Jeanmar Gomez, who turned in the final scoreless inning necessary. Sometimes good teams are said to have bullpen formulas. This is the Phillies’ formula, and it’s helped propel them into a wild-card spot. The Phillies are in a wild-card spot. You know who’s in a wild-card spot? The Phillies.

Read the rest of this entry »

You know who’s figuring it out? Christian Yelich! Not that Yelich ever didn’t have it figured out — his big-league career began with three consecutive 117 wRC+ seasons. He was as steady as anyone you could find, but he kept on occasionally hinting at more, and now he’s showing more more often. He’s 24, and he’s being coached by Barry Bonds. People everywhere kind of saw this coming. Yet it was never going to be automatic. Yelich has put in the work to get to where he is.

This is where he is:

Yelich hasn’t been constantly hitting home runs or anything. You would’ve heard about that. He has five, which isn’t that many, but then his career high is nine. His slugging is way up, and his walks are way up, and his strikeouts are down. Christian Yelich seems to be moving into a higher tier, and he’s among the reasons why the Marlins are hanging around the early playoff race.

Read the rest of this entry »