Perhaps it’s felt to you like it’s been a year of bullpen uncertainty. You wouldn’t be alone. Not only are certain bullpens wildly under- or over-achieving; there’s been a good number of jumbled roles. In some cases, there might not be any clear roles at all. I’m not just making that up. It’s essentially a direct quote:

Banister very clear: There are NO roles in the bullpen at the moment

— Evan Grant (@Evan_P_Grant) May 17, 2015

There’s been some weirdness in, for example, Los Angeles. The same could be said of Oakland. Also, Toronto. Also, Tampa Bay. And so on and so forth. It feels like things have been unusually unconventional. It feels like perhaps we’re edging ever nearer to the end of the set closer role. That’s one of the oldest subjects in sabermetric commentary.

And there’s reason to think there’s something bigger going on. Consider what’s taken place within the Dodgers organization. The Dodgers have tried to spread around the saves, so that young pitchers grow accustomed to working out of different roles. This way, they teach their pitchers versatility, and everyone’s subjected to every situation. What that seems like is the future of bullpens. And, you wonder, is the future arriving today? Are we seeing different usage patterns at the major-league level?

Not so much. Not in a way that’s easily observable. The closer role is very much alive, and it’s hard to spot any statistical trends.

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The past year has been a mixed bag for Shelby Miller. In these digital pages during 2014, Dave discussed him being broken during April, Eno postulated on whether he was fixed following the regular season, and then he was traded by the Cardinals in November for Jason Heyward. Now, fresh off a two-hit shutout that is the culmination of a fine early season run, he’s sitting on a microscopic ERA (1.33) and WHIP (0.83). Have the Braves really fixed Miller?

Let’s start with a statistic: .183. That’s Miller’s current BABIP. No other qualified starter in the major leagues has a figure under .215. Case closed, right? His FIP is 3.28 largely because of that BABIP, his high LOB%, and low HR/FB rate, and the regression is coming for him. Yes and no: even if we can expect less absurd batted ball numbers moving forward, there are still a few interesting changes Miller has made that warrant a closer look.

Miller’s turnaround from his general malaise in 2013 and 2014 (when his strikeout rate cratered and walk rate rose by almost 60%) started in September of last year, when his overall command improved, helping to reverse the trends in those strikeout and walk rates. He never had bad command in the minors, so perhaps there was always the potential for a return to better times with his ability to limit free passes.

Eno mentioned that he also started locating his fastball a little bit higher, leading to more whiffs, something Miller may or may not have been consciously doing. That, along with his curveball regaining some of its effectiveness, drove a small return to form at the end of last year.

This year, we’re seeing something entirely different out of Miller. His pitch usage has changed, moving directly to his cutter and sinker over his four-seamer. Take a look:
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In the last couple of weeks, we’ve discussed many of the various aspects of the emerging granular batted-ball velocity/exit angle data that is all the rage today. In the next few articles, we’re going to bring it all together, and review the best and worst contact-makers (and allowers) in both leagues in 2014. Today, we’ll cover the AL offensive contact-quality leaders and laggards. You will notice that contact quality, while extremely important, is far from the singular defining characteristic of a hitter.

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Major League Baseball seems to be in a constant public fight about its popularity and importance in society. To some it is in decline, to others it is boring, and to those who point to attendance and revenue, the sport is vibrant and successful and contradicts the nonsense of those who believe baseball is dying. The sport can always do more to keep the game entertaining, but early signs this season indicate that baseball is still relevant and popular, as both attendance and television ratings are higher — the latter despite an overall decline in cable ratings. Increased ratings mean more people are watching the games but don’t provide any more revenue for the teams. When it comes to the lucrative local television deals, ratings do not drive revenue. Local television revenue is still tied to the health of the major cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner.

Before getting to baseball’s dependence on the health of major cable companies, here is a brief look at some early season numbers. The first month of the season has seen big increases in viewership for national games on Fox Sports 1 and MLB Network, including double the amount of viewers aged 18 to 34 watching game on Fox Sports 1. The Chicago Cubs have doubled their ratings after their increased commitment in the offseason as well as the arrival of Kris Bryant. The Kansas City Royals have done the same coming off their World Series appearance. The Houston Astros have seen an increase in viewership after finally resolving their local disputes, at least as far as getting their games on all the local cable packages. The Arizona Diamondbacks have seen their highest ratings in a decade while the games of the Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, St. Louis Cardinals, and San Diego Padres rank first in their broadcast territories among all shows. A recent article by Maury Brown at Forbes showed that baseball games beat playoff games from the NHL and NBA in many markets across the country.

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On Sunday, the Marlins fired manager Mike Redmond. It’s what teams do when they find themselves performing worse than expected, even if expectations of contention were probably less realistic than the hype would have suggested. The manager is the fall guy when things go badly, though, and things are going badly in Miami, so Redmond was shown the door. It’s how baseball works, especially baseball in Miami, and Redmond certainly knew what he was signing up for when he took the job.

On Monday, though, things took a turn away from the norm. Instead of promoting a minor league manager, or one of the team’s remaining coaches, or even turning to a former player who was being groomed as a manager-of-the-future, the Marlins just put their General Manager in charge of the clubhouse. Dan Jennings, the guy who built this roster, is now tasked with trying to turn it into a winner on the field. After years of ranting that analytical GMs were undermining the value of the manager’s role, it turns out to be an old-school scout who is going to try to run everything all at once. The irony is delicious.

But while I’m no big fan of the Marlins organization, I’m also hesitant to cast too many aspersions against this decision. The narrative is really quite easy and lends itself to scorn and ridicule, but I remain convinced that we, as outsiders, have very little to evaluate the quality of a manager even after we’ve seen them perform at the job, so when it comes to evaluating managerial prospects, I just don’t know that we can say anything with any kind of credibility.

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Last week was relatively eventful for two pending antitrust lawsuits against Major League Baseball. On Thursday, the district court issued an important decision in the Garber v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball suit challenging several of MLB’s television broadcasting practices under the Sherman Antitrust Act. Then later that same day, MLB officially asked the district court to dismiss the Miranda v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball case, a suit contending that MLB’s minor league pay practices violate federal antitrust law.

Let’s start with the Garber case. As both Wendy Thurm and I have previously discussed on several occasions, the Garber suit involves allegations that several of MLB’s television policies violate the Sherman Act. First, the plaintiffs contend that MLB and its regional sports network partners impose unreasonable blackout policies on fans, preventing individual RSNs from competing with one another in each team’s assigned geographic territory. Absent these anticompetitive restrictions, the plaintiffs allege, a Red Sox fan living in California would, for instance, have the option of subscribing to the New England Sports Network (NESN) to watch all of Boston’s game. The resulting competition would, in theory, drive down the cost of sports programming for all baseball fans.

Relatedly, the Garber plaintiffs also accuse MLB of violating antitrust law by selling only league-wide, pay-per-view subscription packages (MLB Extra Innings and MLB.tv), rather than allowing individual teams to offer their own competing out-of-market plans. This restriction on competition also allegedly increases the cost that out-of-market fans pay to watch baseball.

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Monday afternoon, I participated in an Orioles-centric podcast, where one of the things I was supposed to talk about was Manny Machado. I wrote about Machado a couple of weeks ago, and more specifically, I wrote about him suddenly exercising a lot more patience at the plate. From what we understand about plate-discipline statistics, they find themselves pretty fast. It’s unusual when they move around, so Machado’s change was unusual and worth some attention. He seems to be doing the thing we all want prospects to do, but that they only infrequently pull off.

In advance of the podcast, I thought it would be smart to do a little Orioles research. I know some things about them, but I do not know everything about them, since I’m supposed to keep aware of 30 teams until the passing of the deadline renders a few of them irrelevant. Nobody wants to sound unprepared. I checked in on Machado, to make sure things were still keeping up. I checked in on Steve Pearce, out of offensive and defensive curiosity. And it was while scrolling through pages I noticed something about Adam Jones. Machado, as noted, is showing some weird changes in his plate discipline. Jones is, too, in a different way.

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Like most teams, the Tampa Bay Rays utilize PITCHf/x data. Stan Boroski, the club’s bullpen coach, looks at it every morning and, along with pitching coach Jim Hickey, uses the findings as an assessment tool. From time to time, what he sees elicits a call to action regarding a member of the pitching staff..

Boroski, currently in his sixth season with the Rays, and fourth in his current job, discussed Tampa Bay’s use of PITCHf/x on a recent visit to Fenway Park.

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Stan Boroski: “I look at everybody who pitched the night before and go to Jim with what I saw. If everything is within normal parameters, it’s usually just ‘So and so was good last night.’ Nothing is specifically dealt with unless something comes up that needs to be addressed.

“I usually don’t go to Kevin (Cash) unless it’s going to prompt doing something different with a pitcher, something he might need to change. That’s a pitching thing and something we normally don’t need to bother him with. But Kevin understands exactly what’s going on with our PITCHf/x stuff. It’s part of the process of how we evaluate, how we attack, and how we build our pitching. Being the manager, he’s obviously involved in all of that, and being a former catcher, he understands it very well. We’re always on the same page when we talk about it. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t need to explain pitch-framing to you. Some catchers are better at catching pitches than others. Everything under human control has people who are better at it than others. Some of you are thankful that pitch-framing is a skill. Some of you wish that it didn’t exist. It’s an interesting and complicated conversation, getting into whether the strike zone is something to be earned, or an absolute right. It’s also an important conversation, but for the moment, it’s known that some teams get different zones than others do. Been this way for ages.

When we talk about pitch-framing, or pitch-receiving — there still isn’t a consensus term — we’re almost always talking about the backstops. Those are the players, after all, who are doing the catching part. So the natural process is to generate data and see which catchers are the best and which catchers are the worst. Only infrequently do you see steps back. Less is said about the pitchers doing the throwing. Less still is said about the hitters being thrown to. We understand that the strike zone is a little different for everybody. So which teams get the greatest and smallest overall benefit?

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Clayton Kershaw is in unfamiliar territory. The three-time Cy Young award winner and consensus best pitcher in baseball finds himself sporting a 4.24 ERA in mid-May, prompting questions about what might be wrong. As we’ll see, luck has largely been unkind to Kershaw, and he’s due for a big regression toward better numbers; however, he hasn’t been the Kershaw we’ve seen for the past two years in one important part of his game, and that has led to some poor results.

Pitchers can’t control everything on the baseball field. After the ball leaves their hand, control is ceded to the batter, the defense, and luck. Also chief among the factors pitchers have little control over: the rate of men they leave on base, the rate of balls in play that go for hits, and the rate of fly balls that go for home runs. Metrics like FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) and xFIP try to take out a lot of the variability in a pitcher’s stat line influenced by things outside of their control, attempting to measure only what the pitcher is responsible for.

Kershaw has been a victim of some of those factors in 2015. First of all, there’s the rate of balls in play that have actually gone for hits. Here’s a chart of Kershaw’s batting average on balls in play against him over the course of his career compared to league average:

This year batted balls have been finding holes in the infield and gaps in the outfield, something Kershaw doesn’t have much control over. Once those batted balls start finding gloves, they’ll start getting turned into outs more often.

Kershaw’s rate of runners left on base in 2015 has been unlike years past as well. Here’s a chart of the rate at which he’s stranded runners on base over his career compared to league average:

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