Archive for Daily Graphings

Late last summer, Scooter Gennett talked about how improving his plate discipline would make him a more productive hitter. He echoed those words when I spoke to him a few weeks ago. The 25-year-old Brewers second baseman feels better selectivity will result in a higher one-base percentage and, hopefully, more extra-base hits.

Yesterday, Gennett went 2 for 3 with a home run — off Madison Bumgarner, no less — and a walk in Milwaukee’s opener. It was only one game, but it was a nice start and a step in the right direction. The left-handed hitter has a .287 batting average in three MLB seasons, but his .318 OBP and 4.0% walk rate are poor, while his .424 SLG is pedestrian. His track record against same-sided pitchers has left a lot to be desired, making Monday’s blast even more notable.

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Gennett on his all-fields approach: “Basically, I hit the ball where it’s pitched. On a pitch right down the middle, ideally I hit it straight up the middle. If it’s outside corner, I should hit it from the left fielder to the line. Middle away, left center-field gap. Middle in, right center. Inside corner, right-field line. That’s my approach.

“Normally, if I don’t hit the ball where it’s pitched, it’s because of the speed of the pitch. Your timing isn’t going to be perfect every time. If you’re late, you don’t want your normal swing. You got jammed and your bat will break. If I’m late on a pitch that’s middle in, I’ll try to keep my hands inside the ball and maybe punch it to the left side.”

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A hundred and fifty-four days. That’s how long we’ve been wandering in the wilderness. That’s a long time, and especially so when you remember that the wilderness isn’t acres and acres of trees but basketball and hockey. But now we have found civilization because baseball has returned and we are all happy and excited at the prospect of a new season. The dawn of a new season always brings with it questions. Who will be the best team? Who will be the best player? Who will win in the playoffs? What unlikely events will occur? We don’t know, which is why this is so fun. If you could flip to the back of the book and find the answer, you know you would, and but then, when June and July came around, you’d be forced to find something else to do with your life. It’s like that book that lists all the World Series winners from Back to the Future. Screw that book.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t take guess on how things will go. You know we love to take guesses and you love it when we take guesses. In fact, listen to any sports radio now or read any baseball article on the internet and you’ll find guesses as to what will happen this season. Because people love guesses! Some will be grounded in numerics and hard data; others will be pulled, to put it politely, from the darkest of regions. But all are, at their core, guesses. So let’s do some more guessing.

The first baseball game of the season just took place on Sunday. It featured the Pittsburgh Pirates hosting the St. Louis Cardinals. What can that game teach us about the season that is to come here?

Even More Strikeouts

Strikeouts are going up. We know this. We’ve seen graphs and pie charts and other representational forms of data showing how more and more batters are striking out. What’s more, as was pointed out by Steve Treder at The Hardball Times, this isn’t anything new. What is new is the heights to which strikeouts have ascended. Last season, there were over 15 strikeouts per game played (an average of 7.76 per team times two). That means 28% of the total outs in games during the 2015 season came by strikeout. That’s a lot.

Much has been written about this trend, what to do about it, or if it’s even a problem. Perhaps it’ll eventually even out? Not if the first game of the season had anything to say about it. The Pirates struck out just five times against Cardinal pitching including Adam Wainwright, but the Cardinals made up for it by striking out 15 times against Pirate pitching. That’s a total of 19 strikeouts. Divide that by the 51 outs in the game (the Pirates were leading at home so they didn’t bat in the ninth inning) and we can see that 37% of the outs made in the game came on strikeouts. Of course, one game doesn’t dictate an entire season and the strikeout rate in baseball has taken a dip at times over the decades. But strikeouts. Yeesh.

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Meaningful baseball! The world is right again. Full stadiums, actual numbers in the win-loss columns, Curt Schilling in the booth, all of it. Except, as we saw yesterday in our three games during “Soft Opening Day,” the first few games of the season can feel a bit like an extension of spring training — at least performance-wise. Sure, there was Chris Archer and Marcus Stroman dueling in Tampa (even though Archer might not have had the trademark control of his slider at times), and the Royals doing many Royals things, but there were also things like this, in the first game of the day:

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If you made it to Opening Day and wondered why there hadn’t been a greater number of contract extensions signed this spring, you weren’t alone. Just a few days ago, Dave Cameron wondered that very thing, noting that Kolten Wong was the only player to sign an extension, opting for the promise of guaranteed money rather than betting on the arbitration process and hitting free agency. Over the weekend the number of recent extensions doubled, or increased by one, as Gregory Polanco and the Pirates came to terms on a contract extension worth $35 million over five years — with two team options for another $25 million total — according to Ken Rosenthal after Jeff Passan first reported the deal. Polanco only has one year of service time, and with the extension not kicking in until next year so this contract has the potential to buy out three free-agent seasons, but given Polanco’s lack of production thus far, the team is making a bet that Polanco will be better than what he has shown.

The past few springs have seen quite a few contract extensions, and this year is certainly a down year in that regard. Here are position-player extensions from the past few years, including Polanco and Wong. The statistics included here are those produced during the player’s last season prior to the extension.

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I know this goes against the spirit of opening day, when anything can happen and everyone’s tied for first place. Opening day is a magical time precisely because no one’s yet been mathematically eliminated. The season hasn’t started to go down any path, which means the season could still go down any path conceivable. On opening day, everyone’s supposed to be happy; everyone’s supposed to be jazzed about baseball, because there’s not yet any reason not to be. Baseball’s back! It’s been a long time. The Royals just proved the numbers wrong the last time around. Maybe now it’s another team’s turn.

If you’re a fan in New York, you’re excited about baseball. If you’re a fan in Atlanta, you’re excited about baseball. If you’re a fan in Arizona, you’re excited about baseball. But: One of the dominant spring-training storylines was that the Dodgers were being undone by injury after injury. And it’s true; The Dodgers have already had their depth challenged, because they’ve got a busy disabled list. Yet, the Dodgers came equipped with reinforcements, so it seems like they should be able to handle this. Right at the end of spring training, the Diamondbacks lost A.J. Pollock. They might’ve lost him for the entire season. With one blow, Arizona has probably been hurt more than Los Angeles, and while anything is still able to happen, it’s a devastating turn of events. Their season hasn’t started yet, and the Diamondbacks might well be screwed.

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It’s Opening Day 2.0, so in what is becoming an annual tradition, let’s talk about some things I believe about what we’re going to see this year. These aren’t things I can definitively back up with evidence, but they are things that I think could be proven true as the year goes on. You can take them with all the necessary grains of salt, but as we head towards 2016, here are the five things that I believe for this year.

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Although the potential health risks of using smokeless tobacco are by now well established, countless Major League Baseball players nevertheless continue to use these products both on and off the playing field, much to the chagrin of MLB. And despite these dangers, the league has, to date, been largely unable to convince the Major League Baseball Players Association to agree to prohibit players from using tobacco products in MLB stadiums.

Recently, however, MLB’s efforts to curtail its players’ use of smokeless tobacco products gained new momentum from a rather unlikely source: local municipal governments. In recent months, three major-league cities – Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – have each passed new laws formally banning the use of smokeless tobacco in public facilities, including MLB ballparks. Meanwhile, with a similar tobacco ban set to take effect throughout the entire state of California in 2017, along with comparable legislation currently making its way through the city governments of Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Washington D.C., smokeless tobacco use could soon be legally prohibited in more than one-third of MLB’s 30 ballparks.

When these local ordinances were initially enacted, many were skeptical that the laws would actually deter MLB players from using tobacco products, since any player intent on ignoring the new prohibitions would easily be able to afford to pay a relatively modest monetary fine in exchange for breaking the law.

However, while the threat of punishment under these local laws alone may not be enough to change players’ behavior, these ordinances have created a new avenue for MLB to attack the problem, one that could potentially let the league punish players for their tobacco use.

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It’s difficult to write about the bigger picture when there have been precisely three games played in the regular season. The picture, as it stands now, is microscopically small. So we focus on the little things. We observe, but we try not to draw conclusions. Mostly, we wonder and speculate about the upcoming year, just like we have been throughout the entire offseason, except now, we do so with a tiny bit of knowledge about what that year actually entails.

One of the things I’m interested to watch this year is the development of an eight-year trend of pitchers throwing fewer and fewer pitches in the strike zone while getting batters to chase more and more balls. Most specifically, I’m interested in watching Francisco Liriano, the leader of the “throw strikes never” movement. The last couple years, Liriano has simultaneously thrown the fewest percentage of pitches inside the zone while also generating one of the highest chase rates.

Liriano already walks a ton of batters, and knowing those two facts, the logical question one asks oneself is, “Why do batters keep swinging?” Seems it should be easy to let Liriano beat himself. Spoiler alert: nothing about baseball is easy.

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Javier Baez has been burdened by strikeouts. The promising young Cub has a 38.5% k-rate and an 18.5% swinging strike rate in 309 big-league plate appearances. There were a plethora of whiffs in the minors as well, so his contact issues extend beyond the expected MLB learning curve.

Baez has plus power, especially for a middle infielder. He hit 37 home runs between high-A and Double-A in 2013, and a year later he went deep 23 times in 434 Triple-A at bats.

Reaching the bleachers isn’t his primary goal.

“I’m not trying to hit for power,” Baez told me this spring. “I’m just trying to make contact, and if it goes over the fence, fine. I’m trying to hit the ball hard.”

Hitting it at all has been a challenge, and the 23-year-old former first-round pick is aware of his deficiencies. Ironing them out is the hurdle. In his eyes, mechanics aren’t the problem. Read the rest of this entry »