Most players make it to Major League Baseball without a fully refined skillset. Some players make it to the majors with a particular skill so great it outweighs a lack of skills normally required to function at the major-league level. Sometimes, it is an electric fastball despite a lack of command or secondary pitches. For Dee Gordon and Billy Hamilton, it was elite speed. For players like Yadier Molina and Jose Iglesias, their defensive skills so outweighed their offensive ineptitude that they were brought to the major leagues without the ability to hit anywhere near a major-league level.

Jose Iglesias never hit well in the minor leagues, but his glove has earned him repeated promotions and a starting shortstop job. Iglesias’s development as a hitter was slowed further by losing 2014 due to stress fractures in both legs, but he’s been very successful putting the ball in play this season, capped by a recent extra-inning single that knocked in the winning run in Detroit’s 4-3 10-inning win against the Cardinals on Saturday. At just 25 years old, he has a hitting profile similar to current BABIP sensation Dee Gordon, and while Iglesias could still develop as a hitter like Yadier Molina or other defensive-first shortstops like Ozzie Smith or Omar Vizquel, his hot start is not likely to last.

Iglesias was called up for a week in 2011 as a 21-year-old for the Boston Red Sox when he was hitting .259 with just two walks and no extra-base hits in the early part of the season. He received just four plate appearances before returning to the minors. He was called up again in September to receive a couple more trips to the plate, after hitting just .235/.285/.269 in close to a full season in the minors. In 2012, during the Red Sox lost season, Iglesias again earned a callup, this time after hitting .266/.318/.306 in his final full Triple-A season. He notched just eight hits in 77 plate appearances at the big-league level, but already received comparisons to Omar Vizquel. He began 2013 in Triple-A and hit just .202/.262/.319 before making the big leagues for good.

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Mat Latos throws a pitch that nobody in the big leagues throws. For good reason, too. He has no idea where it’s going.

“I was told in high school that it would never be a realistic pitch in the big leagues,” Latos said when I asked him about the pitch that he gripped like a knuckle curve but released like a changeup and was neither his breaking ball nor his changeup. Yeah, I said, sure, but what is this pitch?

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Three years later, the Houston Astros’ 2012 draft is looking pretty good. Carlos Correa, their first overall pick in that year’s draft, absolutely annihilated Double-A pitching in the season’s first month. Unsurprisingly, his performance culminated in a promotion to Triple-A last week. Lance McCullers, Houston’s 41st overall pick that year, also earned a promotion with an outstanding start in Double-A. However, the Astros didn’t send McCullers to Triple-A, but straight to the majors. He’ll make his big-league debut tonight against the Oakland Athletics.

Heading into the season, McCullers looked like he was at least a year or two away from breaking into the majors. He was coming off of a rough 2014 campaign, where he pitched to a disappointing 5.47 ERA and an equally disappointing 5.73 FIP in High-A Lancaster. The biggest culprit for his struggles was his spotty command, which manifested itself in a 13% walk rate and 4% home-run rate (1.7 HR/9).

But things have been much different for the 21-year-old this year. He was nearly unhittable in his 29 innings with Double-A Corpus Christi. He struck out 37% of the batters he faced, and allowed just one homer. The hard-throwing righty posted a laughable 0.62 ERA, and his 2.26 FIP suggests his performance wasn’t entirely a fluke.

Here’s a look at one of his many strikeouts. This clip features McCullers’ curveball, which received 55/65 present/future grades from Kiley McDaniel over the off-season. The victim is fellow top-200 prospect Renato Nunez of the Oakland system.

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Did you see Giancarlo Stanton’s homer that went out of Dodger Stadium? Stanton hit and the Dodger fans went “OOOOHHH!” and then 467 feet later, when they saw it go out, they went “OOOOHHH!” again. The Marlins color guy punctuated the moment by saying, “You don’t see that every night!” which indeed is true but maybe undersells it a bit. I mean I’d go so far as to say you don’t see that even every other night! In 4,000 lifetimes you and I could never do that, but Stanton did it in this one. Amazing.

Less amazing but more pertinent to this article is what kind of effect that has on the pitcher. As a former high-school pitcher (second-team all district, baby!) I’ve given up a homer or two and, in my very limited experience, when you face that guy again one of two things happens. The first is you challenge him again because he can’t hit your best stuff and also you’re an idiot. The second is you stay the heck away from throwing him the pitch he crushed in the first at-bat and probably stay the heck away from throwing him anything hittable in general. But that’s me in high school. Are major-league pitchers like that? At least one is!

Mike Bolsinger was the starting pitcher for the Dodgers last Tuesday. It was his 86 mph cutter at the top of the strike zone that Stanton hit so hard it briefly turned the fans of Dodger Stadium from Dodger fans into Marlins fans. An inspection of the relevant at-bat reveals that Bolsinger missed his location on both pitches he threw Stanton. The first cutter was supposed to be low and away but was up at the top of the strike zone. He was lucky Stanton missed it. The next one was supposed to be belt-high inside (there was nobody on base so I’m going by where the catcher set up). Bolsinger got the height right but left the pitch just a bit further over the plate than he probably wanted, a few inches which wound up endangering the well-being of anyone walking outside the left field area of Dodger Stadium.

So how did Bolsinger react to facing Stanton a second time? So this is interesting! Bolsinger threw Stanton six straight curveballs! Common perception is that you don’t want to throw too many of the same kind of pitch consecutively for fear the batter will hone in on the specific movement of the pitch. Mike Bolsinger may have many fears — groundhogs and people who don’t use coasters potentially among them — but what he definitely isn’t afraid of is throwing the same pitch twice.

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Barry Bonds last played in a major league game in 2007. Eight years later, he is now reportedly preparing to file a grievance against Major League Baseball, contending that MLB and its teams improperly colluded to prematurely drive him from the game.

As you may recall, back in 2007 Bonds hit an impressive .276/.480/.565 during his age-43 season, all while setting MLB’s all-time career home run record by hitting his 756th career HR in August. And although Bonds was projected to post a .380 wOBA for the 2008 season, he nevertheless went unsigned that off-season, effectively ending his major league career. This despite the fact that he had even gone so far as to offer to play for the league minimum salary (set at the time at $390,000 per year).

These relatively suspicious circumstances caused many to speculate that MLB’s teams conspired together to drive Bonds from the game. Indeed, both Bonds’ agent (Jeff Borris) and the Major League Baseball Players Association expressed concern at the time that MLB clubs had jointly agreed not to sign Bonds, with the MLBPA announcing after the 2008 season that it had found evidence of improper collusion. Despite all of this, however, Bonds and the union ultimately decided at the time not to officially charge MLB’s franchises with collusion, instead reaching an agreement with MLB to postpone any grievance against the league until Bonds had resolved his then-pending criminal charges relating to his alleged perjury and obstruction of justice during the federal BALCO investigation.

Fast-forward to last month, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Bonds’ criminal conviction for obstruction of justice. With Bonds’ criminal troubles now all but behind him – technically, prosecutors are still considering whether to file a long-shot, last-ditch appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court – he is now once again returning his attention to potentially filing a grievance against MLB. So does Bonds has any chance of winning a case against the league, and if so, what might he stand to gain from charging its teams with collusion?

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Aroldis Chapman was a major-league rookie in 2010, but it took no time at all for him to make a name for himself. Joel Zumaya had re-introduced the population to consistent triple digits, but Chapman pushed the limits to the extreme. In his 11th-ever outing, Chapman took the mound in San Diego, and the first pitch he threw came in at 101.5 miles per hour. Then he broke 100 again, then he broke 100 again. Then he did it again, then he did it again. Chapman threw 25 pitches on the night, and the slowest of them was an even 100. That fact was one highlight. The other highlight was one individual pitch he threw to Tony Gwynn Jr. With the count 1-and-2, Chapman missed just inside at 105.1. The enemy crowd came to life as soon as the scoreboard flashed the reading.

Last week, the Marlins took on the Dodgers in Los Angeles. Giancarlo Stanton was granted the opportunity to face Mike Bolsinger, and in an 0-and-1 count in the top of the first, Bolsinger left a fastball over the middle of the plate. Stanton swung, and connected, and the next thing the baseball knew, it was somewhere in one of the parking lots. Stanton hit a ball literally out of the stadium, and as he rounded the bases and approached home plate, he was given something of a standing ovation by the fans who just watched their team fall behind.

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The lead article in this week’s column is a little off the wall. Indirectly, it celebrates Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971, which opens today at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Chris Archer was unfamiliar with Ono when I approached him with this idea. That didn’t matter, because the 26-year-old Tampa Bay Rays pitcher is among the most thoughtful players in the game. The subject matter was in his cerebral sweet spot.

For those of you unfamiliar with Ono, she is more than an avant-garde artist. She is also a legendary singer-songwriter, and was married to the late John Lennon. One of her compositions is “Beautiful Boys,” which appeared on their album Double Fantasy. What follows is lyrics from the song (in italics), followed by Archer’s interpretation of them.

You’re a beautiful boy with all your little toys
Your eyes have seen the world, though you’re only four years old
And your tears are streaming even when you’re smiling
Please never be afraid to cry. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of an ongoing arbitration research project and is coauthored by Alex Chamberlain and Sean Dolinar.

April 24: Modeling Salary Arbitration: Introduction

Feb. 25: 2015 MLB Arbitration Visualized

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A couple of weeks ago, we introduced a couple of regressions that modeled arbitration results using a basic formulae predicated on wins above replacement (WAR). Ultimately, the models estimated that an arbitration-eligible pitcher could expect his salary to increase by 14 percent, and his raise in salary to increase by 56 percent, for each additional WAR. A hitter could expect increases of 13 percent and 46 percent, respectively.

The models, however, were incomplete: they did not incorporate any other stats aside from WAR. This was by design, as we wanted to introduce simple one-variable equations for the sake of demonstration. WAR is, conveniently, a comprehensive variable that attempts to summarize a player’s worth in one easily digestible number. But what about the effects of a player’s age or arbitration year?

Moreover, the r-squared statistic — a quick-and-easy check of a model’s validity — for each specification is not especially strong, clocking in anywhere between .30 and .56. This is partly a result of specifying only one explanatory variable, so including more variables — which we have done in this post — should improve the goodness of fit of the models, assuming the variables are relevant.

With that said, we have new-and-improved models to share with you: one comprised of composite statistics and another comprised of traditional statistics. They are all vanilla, linear ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models, and it is important to remember that the values for each stat can only be used in the context of that specific model.

Non-Traditional Statistics

For each player, we specify…

• a composite statistic, such as wins above replacement (WAR) for batters and RA9-WAR for pitchers, to measure overall performance (RA9-WAR uses runs allowed per nine innings rather than FIP);
• a service statistic, such as plate appearances (PA) and innings pitched (IP), to measure playing time;
• a “glory” statistic, such as home runs (HR) and saves (SV), to account for baseball’s affinity for traditional statistics and social constructs;
• arbitration year (for pitchers*), indicating a player’s total service time;
• and his age (for hitters*), to measure as best we can the number of years for which he has inhabited the earth.

We identify these particular stats not only to cover as much analytical ground as possible but also minimize the use of stats that have high correlation among themselves (multicollinearity). We want to isolate different aspects of player performance or value as best we can.

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In the next round of negotiations between the players’ union (MLBPA) and the owners, the union’s aim will be to close the growing gap between player salaries and owner revenues. Player salaries a decade ago represented 50% or more of revenue, but that percentage has fallen under 40% as salaries have not kept pace with revenue. The players have several options to try and increase salaries, but the simplest and perhaps most effective route is to significantly increase the minimum salary.

The players separate themselves into classes based on service time, prioritizing the money in free agency upon reaching six years of service time above all else. A tier below the free agents are those with at least three years of service time who are eligible for salary arbitration and generally receive between 40-80% of free agency salaries on one-year contracts. A step below the arbitration eligible-players are active Major League Baseball players with under three years of service time (except for the top 22% of players with between two and three years of service time who are also eligible for arbitration). The MLB players not eligible for arbitration have their salary set by their team, usually very close to MLB minimum which is currently $507,500 and has slowly increased in the past decade. In the tiers below active players, there are players on the 40-man roster in the minor leagues who receive union protection and a minimum minor-league salary, and then there are the rest of the minor leaguers who are not in the union and had many potential protections and salary bonuses bargained away by the players’ union.

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