Archive for Daily Graphings

The Mariners needed a center fielder after they sent Brad Miller and Austin Jackson packing over the past year. They had an extra reliever, maybe, after they acquired Joaquin Benoit from the Padres last week. And, even given all the flaws in their new (probably platoon) center fielder, it’s hard not to like such a low-risk, high-reward move. Even if you value relievers highly.

But these are the things you have to talk about when you try to evaluate the trade that sent center fielder Leonys Martin and reliever Anthony Bass to the Mariners and reliever Tom Wilhelmsen and outfielder James Jones to the Rangers.

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Early in this year’s postseason, the excellent Jessica Mendoza made several references in the broadcast booth to the idea of the “non-competitive pitch.” We know that pitchers, most often, are trying to throw strikes. We know that, other times, a pitcher will intentionally locate a ball outside of the strike zone, attempting to coax a batter into a misguided swing. For these pitches to be effective, they need to be reasonably close to the edges of the zone. Otherwise, the batter won’t swing. When located well, even if the batters don’t swing, you’ll hear these referred to as “good misses.”

What a pitcher is rarely, if ever, trying to do is locate dramatically outside of the strike zone. I’m talking several feet. These pitches happen, but for all intents and purposes, they’re unintentional and serve no use. They’re an extra tally on your pitch count and they almost exclusively go for a ball without any real chance of a swing. This was something upon which I briefly touched in my review of Gerrit Cole’s rough Wild Card start, in which he threw three of these non-competitive pitches consecutively to Kris Bryant to issue a walk after getting ahead in the count, 1-2.

When I wrote that post, I knew I’d revisit the topic in the offseason. The thing about a data set is, there’s always a most extreme something. Someone threw more non-competitive pitches than anyone else. One ball may not seem like a huge deal, but the difference between a ball and a strike changes the nature of an at-bat. After a first-pitch strike this season, batters had a .609 OPS. That’s Alexi Amarista. After a first-pitch ball, batters had an .815 OPS. That’s J.D. Martinez. The average run value of the difference between a ball and a strike is typically worth between one- and two-tenths of an entire run! Throw a lot of non-competitive pitches — automatic balls — and it will add up. We just need to define non-competitive, and then find them.

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Luck. We know it’s a large part of baseball. It’s also the foundation for the central questions we ask when trying to analyze the game: what was a certain player or team’s actual performance? How much control did they have over their production? Can they recreate it next year? We never stop debating these points. We create new statistics to try to answer them a little better than we did last season. And, despite there being certain influences we can’t measure when looking at individual and team production, we do have a few tools at our disposal to tell us who might have been underperformed, and who might have overperformed.

One of those tools is Fielding Independent Pitching, which strips away some of the influences a pitcher can’t control — namely what happens when a ball is put into play and the timing of events that unfold against them. With FIP, we can see who might have gotten unlucky with batted balls finding holes in the defense more often than expected, and conversely, who might’ve benefited from batted balls being hit straight at defenders. After a lot of groundbreaking research, it was found that pitchers don’t have a lot of control over what happens once the ball leaves their hand. Comparing FIP to actual performance — namely ERA — we can see the teams and players who might’ve gotten lucky and unlucky over the course of this past season.

Today, we’re going to look at which team’s starting rotations overachieved and underachieved, as judged by FIP. I’ve charted each starting rotation’s ERA and FIP in an interactive graph, sorted by the best ERA in 2015. If a rotation’s FIP (their expected average runs against) was lower than their ERA (their actual average runs against), they underachieved; if their ERA was lower than their FIP, they overachieved. One of the best things about FIP is that it can be used exactly like ERA, so understanding it is intuitive: treat it exactly like you would Earned Run Average. After we look at the chart, we’ll go through some individual examples, but this should give us a good primer on the subject. Again, feel free to mouse over the chart to see each team’s specific data:

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The Chicago Cubs are located within the third-largest media market in the country, have a base of rabid fans supporting the team even in lean years, and — despite having closed the bleachers for much of the early part of the 2015 season — have received greater attendances at Wrigley Field since 2011, in part due to the team’s playoff run this year. While the team has started to have tremendous success on the field, they are moving forward slowly with payroll due to renovations around the ballpark, investments in rooftop bleachers, debt incurred by the Ricketts family when they bought the team, and a below-market television contract that runs out after four more seasons.

That the Cubs are interested in starting their own cable network in Chicago is not a secret. The team’s deal with Comcast runs out after 2019, and they have been setting the stage for an exit. The Chicago Cubs have a long history of airing games locally on WGN, which also found its way on to most cable packages around the country. The Tribune Company owned WGN as well as the Chicago Cubs, and the baseball team provided the company with relatively inexpensive programming that provided a big help to the bottom line.

The television industry, and in particular the sports television industry, have changed over time, rending the broadcast of games on WGN less beneficial. Regional sports networks began swooping up the rights to local baseball games, putting more and more games on cable. The regional sports networks gained much of their revenue from subscriber fees as opposed to traditional advertising, and cable providers felt these stations were necessary to give to subscribers as part of the basic cable bundle. This meant that the Tribune Comany airing games on WGN, while a cable channel to those outside of Chicago, was not maximizing revenue by putting games over the air in Chicago.

In 2004, Comcast Sportsnet Chicago (CSN Chicago) was formed. At the time the Tribune Company still owned the Cubs. CSN Chicago’s ownership was split between the local clubs. Right now, the split is 20% each to the owners of the Cubs, White Sox, Bulls, and Blackhawks, with the remaining 20% to NBC/Universal. Jerry Reinsdorf has the biggest share at 40%, as he owns both the Bulls and White Sox. The Cubs kept about half of their games on WGN, but opted out of that contract when it was up after the 2014 season. The Cubs negotiated their current contract with WGN and the local ABC affiliate so that they would expire after 2019, the same season as their deal with Comcast.

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The Padres and Red Sox swung a deal on Friday night that sent Craig Kimbrel to Boston in exchange for a quartet of prospects: outfielder Manny Margot, shortstop Javier Guerra, second baseman Carlos Asuaje and left-handed pitcher Logan Allen. As Dave Cameron noted immediately following the trade, the Red Sox coughed up quite a package for the rights to Kimbrel. Not only did San Diego receive a high-quality prospect in Margot, but they got quantity as well. Here’s what my fancy computer math says about these prospects. The numbers next to their names refer to their projected WAR totals through age 28 according to KATOH.

Manny Margot, 10.2 WAR

The Red Sox signed Manny Margot as a 16-year-old out of the Dominican back in 2011, and he’s hit at every stop since then. He put himself on the prospect map in 2014 with a strong showing in Low-A, but he outdid himself in 2015 by essentially replicating those numbers in both High-A and Double-A. Margot makes a ton of contact, hits for modest power and runs wild on the base paths. All of that bodes well for his future in the show, especially considering he’s always been very young for his levels. Here are some comps that were generated using a series of Mahalanobis distance calculations.

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John Coppolella has a plan. He also has a goal, which is to help return the Atlanta Braves to prominence. Last week, the 37-year-old general manager – along with president of baseball operations John Hart – made a bold move toward that end. Andrelton Simmons, a gifted and popular shortstop, was traded to Anaheim in exchange for Erick Aybar and a pair of pitching prospects.

The deal wasn’t particularly popular, but that’s not Coppolella’s biggest concern. The Braves are coming off a pair of losing campaigns, and they’ll be moving into a new stadium for the 2017 season. The fan base expects a winner, and that is what Coppolella and Company are working to build.

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Coppolella on trading Andrelton Simmons: “It was a talent-based deal for us. Using scouting and analytics we simply felt the talent level we were getting back in this deal was too good to pass up. We have high hopes, in the short- and long-term, for all three of the players we acquired.

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Matt Klentak is more analytical than Ruben Amaro. Unless you’re a stark traditionalist, that’s a big positive for Phillies fans. Philadelphia’s new general manager – a 36-year-old Dartmouth College graduate with a degree in economics – is committed to bringing one of baseball’s least saber-friendly teams out of the dark ages.

Klentak’s approach is information-driven. He came back to the word “information” again and again when we spoke at this week’s GM meetings in Boca Raton.

“Philosophically, I am very much of the mind to use all of the information to make every decision that we make,” Klentak told me. “I’m not a huge fan of operating under any sort of absolutes, but I want to make sure that we’re managing all of the information as well as we can.

“In order to use and manage all of the information, we have to have that information in the first place. We’re going to make sure – particularly this offseason, as we’re rolling things out – that we are bringing in the best data, and the best people to analyze the data, that we can. We’ll incorporate all of that into our decision-making process.” Read the rest of this entry »

Toward the end of July, something had become apparent in the 2015 season: it was an unquestionably great year for talented positional rookies. That was easy to see by the first half introduction of All-Star caliber players in Kris Bryant, Carlos Correa, and Joc Pederson. Many others added to the top-heavy, strong class. As it turns out, that excellence was also borne out in the data: the first half of the 2015 season had the most rookies with 1.0+ WAR and the most combined rookie WAR since 2005.

Digging a little deeper, it turned out that only two seasons in the last 40 years compared to the playing-time adjusted WAR the 2015 rookies put up in the first half. Take a look at this interactive chart that compares the first half of this past season with those from the past 40 years:

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Among the comments made by Jerry Dipoto in his conversation with David Laurila at the recently concluded GM meetings, one finds a fascinating statement by the new Mariners general manager on the topic of identifying undervalued offense, and nine things that successful hitters do.

We’ve defined a nine-point criteria of what we believe a quality at-bat consists of. If you do those things, you can play here.

What a delicious quote. What could those nine points be?

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Say this for new Angels shortstop Andrelton Simmons: He makes things pretty easy. You can look at the regular numbers, or you can look at the more complicated numbers, or you can just watch video of Simmons playing so you can evaluate him with your own eyes. It doesn’t matter, because you’ll always arrive at the same place. This is a player who hasn’t yet been a very good hitter. But this is also a tremendously skilled defender. Simmons is obviously an excellent shortstop. He’s pretty obviously one of the best defensive talents in baseball right now.

For however much complaining there is that we still aren’t great at measuring defensive performance, Simmons isn’t a shortstop to be debated. This is an open and closed case — he’s great. He’s great by observation. He’s great by reputation. He’s great by the way he’s discussed within the industry.

And the numbers are there. Since Simmons broke into the league, he’s been the game’s best defensive shortstop according to Defensive Runs Saved. He’s been the game’s best defensive shortstop according to Ultimate Zone Rating. He’s been the game’s best defensive shortstop according to Inside Edge, another data source. And he’s been the game’s best defensive shortstop according to the Fan Scouting Report, a project that asks baseball fans every year to make their own defensive evaluations. This intro has probably gone on too long, because it’s not like you need to be convinced. No one needs to be convinced about Andrelton Simmons.

Still, there’s the concern you can’t get away from. It’s concern that in part led to the Braves trading Simmons in the first place. The defense is always there, but hitting numbers are always more visible, and Simmons hasn’t been an offensive threat. Last season he slugged .338; the season before he slugged .331. He doesn’t seem to be improving very much, and there are people who wonder if he hits enough. People who think the offense is a big problem, no matter what happens on the other side of the ball.

Let’s talk quickly about Simmons’ hitting.

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