Archive for Daily Graphings

A few months ago, someone asked me who the most underrated player in baseball was, and after kicking around a few names, I settled on Arizona outfielder A.J. Pollock. Pollock got to the big leagues as a speed-and-defense center fielder who hit well enough to justify a regular gig, and then had his breakout year derailed last season when Johnny Cueto hit him in the hand with a fastball. Since he missed roughly half the season, it was easy to overlook his offensive improvements, but Pollock carried the added power and improved contact rate over to this season, and has developed into one of the very best outfielders in all of baseball.

But Pollock’s 2015 season has been so good that it’s hard to call him the game’s most underrated player anymore. After all, he made the All-Star team this year, and thanks to a .325 average and a decent likelihood of being honored with a Gold Glove at years end, he’s not really flying under the radar anymore. Like Ben Zobrist and Bobby Abreu, Pollock might have been mentioned as the game’s most underrated player so many times that he’s now being properly rated.

But even with Pollock’s graduation to stardom now being pretty widely accepted, I still think the game’s most underrated player might be an outfielder for the Diamondbacks. This time, I’m going with Pollock’s teammate David Peralta.

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A little over a month ago, Dave ran through his annual trade value rankings, and as he likes to do, after all the good bits, he wrote up the bad bit, addressing the game’s least-valuable players. Ranking third on his list was fallen Tigers ace Justin Verlander, whose contract is steady even when the pitching isn’t. Verlander ranked worse than Matt Kemp. Worse than Shin-Soo Choo. He’s making $28 million a year through 2019, and when Dave wrote the post up, Verlander looked like a wreck, after a season in which he also looked like a wreck. Verlander’s contract has been used as one of the reasons why the Tigers might be headed for disaster.

And, the Tigers might be headed for disaster. So might you and I be, I don’t know. Who knows anything? One thing I think I know, though — Verlander has turned things around. As the Tigers have faded out of the race, Verlander has seemingly re-emerged, and now it’s worth wondering what he actually is. Just as the world was getting used to the idea of an underwhelming, under-performing Justin Verlander, he’s showing signs that he…might…be…back? What if that were true? Are we open to the chance that that’s true?

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A week and a half ago, there was a remarkable home run, which I like. I’m drawn to those kinds of things, and I almost can’t help myself but write about them. I was floored by the home run itself; it was one of the most obvious subjects ever provided to me. The only problem was then I didn’t write for a week. The moment passed. Usually, these things have to be written right away, or people cease to be interested. It’s been a while since the home run, now. People are thinking about other things. The Mets. The Mets are neat.

I feel like I have to do it, though. I can’t let it fade away — FanGraphs needs to have a post dedicated to this home run. It was sufficiently incredible that we’d be doing you a disservice by not putting something together. While I know the moment is gone, this is a home run with a longer life, a home run for which you needn’t worry about context. Come with me back to Saturday, August 15. We’re going to watch the Indians and the Twins in Minnesota. We’re going to watch them because, in the fifth inning, there was Eddie Rosario.

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Around here, you know that we spend a lot of time working with metrics that attempt to strip noise out of results. Often times, we’re less concerned with what has happened and more concerned with what is going to happen, and these component metrics often do a better job of isolating either a player or a team’s overall contribution to the results, while removing some of the factors that lead to those results but aren’t likely to continue in the future.

At the team level, the most comprehensive component metric we host is called BaseRuns, which evaluates a team’s quality based on all the plays they were involved in, without regard for the sequence in which those events occurred. BaseRuns essentially gives us a context-neutral evaluation of a team’s performance, assuming that the distribution of hits and runs isn’t really something a team has a lot of control over. BaseRuns can be thought of as the spiritual successor to Bill James‘ implementation of the pythagorean theorem to baseball, as pythag strips sequencing out of the conversion of runs to wins, but doesn’t do anything to strip the sequencing effects out of turning specific plays into runs scored and runs allowed.

Historically, BaseRuns has worked really well. For the years we have historical BaseRuns data (2002 to 2014), one standard deviation was right around four wins, and the data appears to be normally distributed; 73% of team-seasons have fallen within one standard deviation, 97% of team-seasons have fallen within two standard deviations, and no team had ever exceeded three standard deviations. There have been years here and there where a team sequenced their way to an extra 11 or 12 wins, but they weren’t very common, and that was usually the only break from the norm in that season.

Until this year. Here is the year by year standard deviation in BaseRuns wins versus actual wins for every year that we have the data.

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It’s no secret that the Washington Nationals have fallen short of expectations this season. At 62-61, the unanimous NL East favorites from the preseason sit 5.5 games behind the Mets with a discouraging 19% chance of winning the NL East. Things have been particularly ugly of late, as the Nats have won just 11 of their last 30 games.

As Dave Cameron pointed out last week, several of the biggest culprits for the team’s struggles are members of the team’s offensive core. Anthony Rendon and Ryan Zimmerman have been bad. Jayson Werth’s been worse than that. But perhaps the biggest disappointment has been the team’s shortstop, Ian Desmond, who was projected for the second-highest WAR among Nationals hitters by ZiPS. Desmond’s .229/.279/.384 batting line has put him within spitting distance of replacement level — a far cry from his preseason ZiPS forecast of 4.0 WAR.

Despite his struggles, the Nationals stuck with Desmond over the season’s first four-and-a-half months, trotting him out there in 119 of their 123 games this season. But on Friday, the team began to diverge from the status quo. After weeks of speculation, the Nats finally summoned prospect Trea Turner to the big leagues to help solidify the shortstop position from here on out.

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When faced with batters on base, Milwaukee Brewers righty Taylor Jungmann goes to his sinker more and throws lower in the zone. He hasn’t given up a home run on the sinker, and the pitch produces ground balls nearly three-quarters of the time. So why doesn’t Jungmann go to the sinker more often?

“What makes the sinker better is that I don’t throw it as much,” Jungmann told me before a game against San Francisco. “It makes it that much more effective because they aren’t looking for it. If I threw it every single pitch, my four-seamer would be better.”

Right now, Jungmann has found the right uses for his sinker. If he used it more, he’d get less value from each additional sinker. This is what makes evaluating pitches by their peripherals so difficult, especially in small samples. Sure, Mat Latos has gotten six whiffs on 24 changeups this year — for a percentage that’s almost twice the average changeup whiff rate — but that doesn’t make the pitch good.

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Hello and welcome to a relatively easy post to generate on the other side of a week off. You might already be familiar with the idea, so if that’s the case, then once again, you’re invited to just skip ahead to the table and move on from there, after having interpreted it yourself. You are your own boss; you read however many words you choose.

This is the third post in what I guess is a four-post series. The first one came when the regular season was about one-quarter old. At the very beginning of July, I did this again, when the season was about one-half old. Now the season is about three-quarters old, so we can check in one more time. Which teams have benefited the most from favorable strike zones? Which teams have paid the greatest penalty, on the other hand? If you accept that all the information comes with some error bars, this is simple. Increasingly simple, as I run these numbers more and more.

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This past weekend, the Toronto Blue Jays swept the Los Angeles Angels in a three-game series, dominating the Halos by a combined score of 36-10. The series represented a few important points: not only did the three wins vault the Jays over the New York Yankees for sole possession of first place in the AL East, but it also featured a matchup of the current favorites in the AL MVP race, Mike Trout and Josh Donaldson. While Trout went 3-10 during the series (all three hits coming in the series finale), Donaldson showed why he is beginning to be viewed as a possible contender for the league’s MVP, going 8 for 13 with a home run, four doubles and nine RBI.

Up until this season — even up until a month ago, in fact — the idea of Donaldson being a serious front-runner in an MVP race would have been viewed as very optimistic. He’s been in the conversation as one of the best overall position players in baseball since his breakout in 2013 (his 21.2 Wins Above Replacement since the start of the 2013 season is second only to Trout’s 25.2), but a strict comparison with Trout in the past probably would have been seen as a reach. That has little to do with Donaldson: Trout is the best player in baseball, and a normal year for Trout would be the best year of basically anyone else’s career.

Then this past offseason’s trade from Oakland to Toronto occurred, and Donaldson showed that the move to the Rogers Centre was most likely going to pay serious dividends for his statistics. Early on in this season, it became evident he might be tailoring his swing to pull more fly balls when he was playing at home, resulting in an astounding power increase that has showed no signs of slowing down in the ensuing months. His home/road splits are more pronounced than they ever have been, showing the influence of his home park’s friendliness to hitters — and his ability to exploit it:

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When you think pitching and greatness it’s unlikely you think of Mike Fiers. Well Friday, Mike Fiers threw a no-hitter against the Los Angeles Dodgers, so in your face. Of course, I’m kidding. No-hitters are fluky events by nature, and though the game’s greats have thrown them, so have many of the game’s not-so-greats. For example, the list of pitchers who have thrown no-hitters includes Joe Cowley, Mike Warren, and Jim Colborn, and excludes Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez*, Curt Schilling, Greg Maddux, and Robin Roberts. But still, pitching nine innings of baseball without giving up a single hit is a feat worthy of recognition and by golly we sure are recognizing it.

*Martinez threw nine perfect innings on June 3, 1995, but allowed a lead-off double in the 10th inning.

But there is controversy! You may have heard that Fiers has been accused of cheating while throwing his no-no. Who has made these accusations? The world’s morality police, also known as the internet, of course! So what “evidence” is there that Fiers cheated?

https://twitter.com/CaseyySheehann/status/634919577567100928

Oh. Whoops.

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