Archive for Daily Graphings

Pretty obviously, it’s too early to learn much from our 2016 regular-season sample sizes. In most cases, we just need to be patient until the sample sizes grow, over the course of weeks or months. We go through this every single year, and it’s just part of re-transitioning into the baseball routine. But what if we could work backwards? Take Kelvin Herrera. What if we could increase his sample size by including last year’s playoffs? It sounds weird, but I’ll tell you why it’s possible: Just in time for the playoffs, Herrera started doing something. He’s continued that something into 2016, and it’s made him unfair.

I’m not even deterred by the fact that I wrote about this last October. I generally don’t like repetition, but it’s a new year, now, and Herrera’s keeping it up. So I won’t stop until more people understand that Kelvin Herrera now possesses a reliable breaking ball, and that goes with his blazing heater and high-80s changeup. The breaker comes in around 81 – 84, and based on what we can see, this is turning Herrera into a monster.

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The way these things – meaning “baseball” – go, the Orioles probably won’t be undefeated for long. Baseball is all about losing. The best teams lose a lot. The worst teams lose a lot a lot. I’m not sure the Orioles are the latter of those things, but even if they’re the first a loss is coming, so we’d better get to this while we can.

Have you seen the standings? Jeff Sullivan examined them a couple days ago here at website Fangraphs dot com and, further, he examined the teams that have improved their chances of making the playoffs the most since the season began.

Now hold that thought because we’re going to come back to it. Remember the preseason? That’s the time we all pretend we know what’s going to happen and make predictions about the upcoming season. These predictions are stupid stupid stupid predictions that will always be wrong because predictions about baseball are always wrong. Anyway, if you examined (lots of examining!) those preseason predictions — specifically the ones concerning the American League Eastern Division — you would find many different permutations. You’d find people who predicted the Red Sox to win the division, others who predicted the Rays, and many others who predicted the Blue Jays. Some even predicted the Yankees. Did anyone pick the Orioles? I didn’t see anyone. The Orioles were the one team it seems nobody thought was going to do squat in the AL East this season. So, of course of course of course they’re 7-0 and in first place. Of course.

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In this week’s third unexpected outfield prospect callup, the Atlanta Braves summoned speedy outfielder Mallex Smith from Triple-A to replace the injured Ender Inciarte. Smith’s been on a tear lately. He slashed an outstanding .346/.393/.808 in spring training, and had a loud three games in Triple-A to start the year. It seems that was enough to convince the Braves he was ready for the next level.

Smith split last season between Double-A and Triple-A, hitting a combined .306/.373/.386 with an eye-popping 57 steals. In 2014, he lead all of organized baseball with 88 stolen bases. Smith’s control of the strike zone and lofty BABIPs result in high OBPs, which allows him to take full advantage of his top-notch speed. Power is the one piece that was missing from Smith’s offensive profile, but just about everything else is there.

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It’s not easy to hit a home run to right field in Fenway Park. It’s actually quite difficult to hit a home run to right field in Fenway Park, even as home runs go. There’s a common misconception that Fenway yields a bunch of cheap dingers. By quantity, Fenway keeps itself reasonable. But it does claim one particular type of cheap dinger, the one where a hitter manages to wrap the ball around Pesky’s Pole. If you place the ball just right down the line, you can hit it 305 feet and take your four bases. It’s absurd when it happens, but so is the fact that we dedicate so much of our attention to the sport in the first place. Don’t tug on that absurdity thread, unless you’re prepared to question more than you’re used to.

Tuesday afternoon, I was watching the Orioles play the Red Sox, and J.J. Hardy slashed a liner to right that bounced off the top of the fence beside the pole. I thought to myself, “ehh, maybe that’s worth an article.” Shortly thereafter I left the house and didn’t think much about it. Imagine my surprise when I found out Hardy did it again, a few innings later. The batted ball itself was different, but the result was the same: Twice in one contest, the right-handed Hardy homered next to the pole. That’s a whole different level of absurd.

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Building a rotation is a difficult task for any organization. Drafting and developing prospects takes time and patience and often yields little in the way of results. Free agency is incredibly expensive not merely for proven pitchers, but unproven and mediocre ones, as well. Trades mean giving up talent and making sacrifices for the future. There is not a best way to build a rotation, but some teams have more limitations than others financially and the most efficient way to build a rotation includes young, cost-controlled starters. Ideally, a team would want the best rotation at the least possible expense. It’s a difficult task, but the New York Mets (to name one team) appear to have accomplished it.

A few weeks ago, FanGraphs previewed the 2016 by using the Depth Chart Projections found here to rank the teams by position. While the exercise itself is most useful for creating context around the projections — and to highlight individual players and teams — the foundation for the whole endeavor is the projections themselves. While often a very small difference exists between certain teams in terms of wins, it’s also true that two equally productive starting rotations, for example, can have very different costs (in dollars). That has an effect on how the corresponding teams can distribute salary throughout the rest of their respective rosters.

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Strikeouts are up! That sentence is obvious enough that the exclamation mark is probably unnecessary. After all, strikeout rates have been trending upward for a long time. Just take a look at the league’s K% over the last two decades:

For a variety of reasons, things really started to trend upward around 2005, but we settled around 20.4% in each of the last two years. Strikeouts appeared to be plateauing. Or, at the very least, their growth rate was starting to taper off. The red line, however, shows the increase from 2015 to 2016. The MLB strikeout rate entering play on Wednesday is 22.0%, a full 1.6 percentage points higher than the previous zenith and a year-over-year jump similar to the 2011 to 2012 spike.

In other words, the preceding exclamation point might be warranted. Strikeouts are indeed up(!) in 2016.

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We all know by now about velocity being up league-wide and strikeouts having been on the rise for more than a decade. If you didn’t: welcome to baseball in 2016! Everyone throws 95 and there’s darn near 20 strikeouts a game now.

The inverse of that, naturally, is that walks are harder to come by. Pitchers are working outside the zone more than ever and hitters aren’t adjusting, and they’re having a harder time catching up to the heat even when it’s inside the zone. Hitters are finding themselves behind in the count far more often than we’ve seen in the past, and in the last two years, we’ve seen the two lowest league-wide walk rates in almost 50 years.

Which brings us to this year’s Chicago Cubs, who aren’t playing by those rules. They’re off to a ridiculous start, with a 6-1 record and a league-best +29 run differential. Their pitchers have struck out 56 batters and walked just nine. Thus far, they’ve looked every bit the powerhouse folks envisioned in the offseason. And there’s another part of this Cubs team that’s staying true to preseason expectations, an important part of the team’s DNA that hasn’t been given much publicity. It’s not a sexy characteristic, which would explain the lack of fanfare surrounding this trait, but it’s an important one. The 2016 Cubs have a very real chance to be the most disciplined lineup we’ve ever seen.

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When I first talked to Delino DeShields, he was 20 years old and finishing up a season in which he hit .287/.389/.428, with 12 home runs, between Low-A and High-A. More notable is the fact that he stole 101 bases. Hardly anyone noticed. That same year, Billy Hamilton swiped an unprecedented 155.

The introduction to the 2012 interview included the following suggestion: “DeShields may ultimately prove to be the better player.”

The jury is still out. Three-plus years later, the Reds’ jackrabbit has the edge in the running game. However, the more well-rounded Ranger has been better with the bat. In last year’s rookie campaign with Texas, DeShields slashed .261/.344/.374 with a team-best 10 triples. His 25 thefts weren’t anything to write home about, but the son of former big-league speedster Delino DeShields, Sr. isn’t too concerned with stolen base numbers. His primary focus is the Runs Scored column.

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DeShields on his overall development: “I’ve come a long way [since 2012]. A lot of that is just maturity and being around the game more and more. Here, I’m around veteran guys who are taking me under their wings and showing me the ropes. These are guys who have been there, done that, and they have your back. They’re always pushing me.

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For a good long while Monday night, Reds fans had reason to be encouraged. The team was already off to a strong start, and then it took a lead on the road against the Cubs, with Brandon Finnegan working on a no-hitter. It promptly came undone. Not only did Finnegan not complete the no-hitter — the Reds didn’t complete a shutout, and actually the Reds didn’t even win the damn game, with the Cubs rallying against the vulnerable bullpen. Reality blows, and it probably wasn’t the last time the Cubs will put the Reds away in some kind of dispiriting fashion. In the span of a few innings, Reds fans were reminded that, yeah, the playoffs probably aren’t going to happen.

I mean, I don’t know. The Reds are still 5-2. Bully for them. They don’t seem like a good team, but teams like this have surprised before. I don’t want to step on any playoff dreams, so I’ll go with this: Perhaps my main positive takeaway has been the work of Finnegan as a starter. I don’t think he’ll be pitching this team into October, but he’s pitched like someone who could do that down the road. That young Reds rotation is starting to take some shape.

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With just over a week of the regular season in the books, it’s high time we concluded our division-by-division, ball-in-play-based analysis of 2015 starting-pitcher performance. Last time, we considered the AL Central. Today, it’s the AL West.

First, some ground rules. To come up with an overall player population roughly equal to one starting rotation per team, the minimum number of batted balls allowed with Statcast readings was set at 243. Pitchers are listed with their 2015 division mates; those who were traded during the season will appear in the division in which they compiled the most innings. Pitchers are listed in “tru” ERA order. For those who have not read my previous articles on the topic, “tru” ERA is the ERA pitchers “should” have compiled based on the actual BIP frequency and authority they allowed relative to the league. Here we go:

Starting Pitcher BIP Profiles – AL West

	AVG MPH	FB/LD MPH	GB MPH	POP %	FLY %	LD %	GB %	ADJ C	K %	BB %	ERA –	FIP –	TRU –
Keuchel	85.78	90.55	83.52	2.4%	17.2%	18.7%	61.7%	83	23.7%	5.6%	62	73	69
McHugh	86.16	89.25	85.12	3.9%	30.7%	20.0%	45.4%	85	19.9%	6.2%	97	89	78
F.Hernandez	88.81	92.10	87.70	2.0%	24.9%	16.9%	56.2%	92	23.1%	7.0%	88	95	79
Gray	88.85	91.89	87.55	2.5%	28.2%	16.6%	52.7%	86	20.3%	7.1%	68	86	80
Iwakuma	88.71	91.87	87.20	2.1%	29.0%	18.5%	50.4%	100	21.5%	4.1%	88	93	82
McCullers	89.16	92.62	85.87	3.0%	28.8%	21.8%	46.5%	99	24.8%	8.3%	80	81	83
Richards	87.48	92.35	85.20	2.9%	25.1%	17.1%	54.9%	88	20.4%	8.8%	91	96	85
Weaver	86.82	91.59	82.47	6.0%	40.5%	19.0%	34.4%	86	13.5%	4.9%	116	120	89
Shoemaker	87.37	91.81	83.55	3.9%	38.5%	18.5%	39.2%	101	20.4%	6.2%	111	114	90
Happ	89.72	91.82	89.71	4.1%	30.0%	24.3%	41.6%	104	21.1%	6.3%	90	85	91
Hahn	86.56	90.70	84.23	1.3%	21.6%	24.5%	52.6%	92	15.8%	6.2%	84	88	92
Kazmir	87.67	92.37	84.43	2.6%	34.7%	19.8%	42.9%	101	20.3%	7.7%	77	99	93
Santiago	89.38	92.96	85.73	5.9%	47.7%	16.5%	29.9%	99	20.9%	9.2%	90	119	94
Elias	88.40	91.68	86.41	3.3%	33.1%	19.4%	44.2%	98	19.8%	9.0%	103	113	94
T.Walker	90.60	92.96	88.48	3.9%	35.1%	22.4%	38.6%	115	22.2%	5.7%	114	101	95
CJ.Wilson	90.07	92.52	88.70	3.4%	31.6%	21.9%	43.1%	103	19.9%	8.3%	97	100	96
J.Chavez	89.21	93.11	85.85	5.4%	28.6%	22.9%	43.1%	110	20.2%	7.1%	104	96	99
Gallardo	88.53	89.92	87.69	2.4%	26.3%	22.0%	49.3%	96	15.3%	8.6%	85	100	102
C.Lewis	89.47	92.22	86.47	3.5%	40.8%	22.0%	33.7%	111	16.5%	4.9%	116	104	104
Feldman	88.34	90.80	87.63	1.7%	25.8%	23.6%	48.9%	101	13.5%	6.0%	97	108	105
Heaney	89.95	93.39	86.67	4.0%	35.5%	22.2%	38.3%	117	17.8%	6.4%	87	93	109
Graveman	90.07	93.10	87.59	1.3%	27.3%	21.4%	50.0%	115	15.3%	7.6%	101	115	116
N.Martinez	89.04	91.44	87.38	3.6%	30.1%	24.0%	42.3%	109	13.8%	8.2%	99	124	116
AVERAGE	88.53	91.87	86.31	3.3%	30.9%	20.6%	45.2%	100	19.1%	6.9%	93	100	93

Most of the column headers are self-explanatory, including average BIP speed (overall and by BIP type), BIP type frequency, K and BB rates, and traditional ERA-, FIP-, and “tru” ERA-. Each pitchers’ Adjusted Contact Score (ADJ C) is also listed. Again, for those of you who have not read my articles on the topic, Unadjusted Contact Score is derived by removing Ks and BBs from opposing hitters’ batting lines, assigning run values to all other events, and comparing them to a league average of 100. Adjusted Contact Score applies league-average production to each pitchers’ individual actual BIP type and velocity mix, and compares it to league average of 100.

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