Because I’m a baseball weblogger and because certain members of my family and community are aware that I’m a baseball weblogger, some of them have asked me — and others will likely ask me at some point this week — “Hey Carson Harrington Cistulli, what do you think about the Hall of Fame voting?”

Why they continue to refer to me by my full name remains a mystery. With regard to their question, however, my answer is generally something along the lines of “Hmph.” Not particularly satisfying, I recognize. So far as takes go, it is decidedly frigid.

As a member of the BBWAA, I’ll theoretically be invited to answer this question in an official capacity about eight years from now. (I don’t think that will actually happen, as all signs indicate that my admission to the Association was the product of a clerical error. For the moment, however, I’ll proceed as if it weren’t.) If and when I receive a ballot for the Hall of Fame, I’ll dedicate sufficiently careful scrutiny to such an endeavor.

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Hello again! This is the National League version of the American League post from a little earlier. In case said American League post contained certain calculation errors, those same calculation errors will be repeated in this very post, as both posts have been written back-to-back and pre-scheduled. In case no such errors are present, you’re welcome, for the absence of errors. This is a link to the NL voting post from last Monday. I don’t know why that would be of use to you now, but there’s a lot of things I don’t know.

So, in this post, a data review, in the same format as the AL post. The same caveats apply: I might’ve biased some of the voters. The pool of voters isn’t identical across the board in identity or size, and about those sizes — the sample sizes don’t number in the hundreds of thousands, or millions. Still, the information will be analyzed, because if the information were not analyzed, what would have been the point of the posts last week? Let’s tie up loose ends, together.

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Hello! Early last week, in part out of curiosity and in part because I had things to do, I asked you to do a bunch of voting related to the site’s Steamer team projections. I put up two posts, and here’s the one about the American League. Basically, we lean on the projections a lot, but we seldom ask for feedback, and I wanted to know how the community felt about projected team records, based on where things stood last Monday. Now, some things have changed since Monday, but nothing important has changed since Monday — excepting, say, Seth Smith — so circumstances remain mostly identical.

At the time, I promised I’d eventually review the data. Here now, the data shall be reviewed, and in this post, I’ll consider the results from the AL polls. I know it’s not perfect science. Different people voted in different team polls. Different numbers of people voted in each team poll. I probably to some extent biased the voters by offering commentary before each poll was embedded. Nevertheless, information is information, and, let’s see what we generated! With which projections do people agree the most? With which projections do people agree the least?

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Like the draft year, the baseball offseason has a feel to it once you’ve been around the game for awhile. Like some draft years, some offseasons are just different, and we are currently living through one of them. The 2005 draft was different; if you had scouting director or national crosschecker-level responsibilities, you stood a good chance of seeing a future major-league All Star on any given day, and you knew it. This offseason, after what seemed to be a few years of relative winter calm, all hell has seemingly broken loose, especially with regard to position-player movement. Today, let’s take a look at team position-player turnover in the divisional era, to get a sense for the historical norms to which 2015 will someday be compared. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been in love with contact rate from the beginning. Admittedly, it doesn’t provide a lot of information you can’t already figure out from strikeout rate, but I like contact rate for its granularity. It’s one of the first stats I look at for pitchers, and it seems like a pretty pure indicator of domination over opponents. What could be better, after all, than a pitch a batter can’t hit? An out on a ball in play, I suppose, but balls in play are dangerous. Nothing dangerous about a swing and miss.

As much as I like contact rate, though, I’ve never thought to try to break it down. Most analysis with contact rate is performed using overall contact rate. Sometimes, it’s using in-zone contact rate, or out-of-zone contact rate. But what I found myself in the mood to do is try to break the numbers down a little bit by count. A thank you, as usual, is extended to Baseball Savant. Because I haven’t spent much time with this data, I can’t really tell you what it means yet, but, you’re here because you want to further your understanding of baseball. I think exploration’s justifiable for exploration’s sake.

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The Phillies just traded Marlon Byrd to the Reds for a pitcher that couldn’t crack Cincinnati’s top ten prospect lists. Could the Phillies have done better than Ben Lively for their asset? The answer to that question depends on deception.

Even though Byrd’s old, he’s been an above-average player the last two years, and he’s signed to a nice contract. Ever since he started swinging harder, missing more, and hitting the ball in the air more, he’s showed enough power to make up for declining defense and patience. Given his publicly-admitted adjustments, and the now two-year sample of evidence, maybe the deceptive thing about Byrd is that he’s not the same player that Steamer is projecting for a half win.

If you base Byrd’s trade value on recent outfield signings instead of straight dollars per win, he has more trade value. In terms of on-field production over the last two years, he compares favorably to another older corner outfielder that got two years and $21 million from the Mets at least. He’d even represent some surplus value when compared to Michael Cuddyer, probably.

Source: FanGraphs — Marlon Byrd, Michael Cuddyer

So you can see that there’s probably not a lot of consensus when it comes to Marlon Byrd’s trade value. There’s even less consensus about the value of the prospect going back to the Phillies.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

Times have changed, finally, in Philadelphia. Approximately two years after most of the rest of us thought it was time to blow things up, and six months after GM Ruben Amaro reportedly told closer Jonathan Papelbon that the team was still attempting to win now, the Philles have eventually seen the light and committed to the future. Jimmy Rollins is gone. Marlon Byrd is gone. Antonio Bastardo is gone. Cole Hamels may yet be gone. Cliff Lee, presuming he can show he’s healthy early in 2015, will almost certainly be gone by July. Papelbon probably follows. It’s possible Chase Utley sticks it out to maintain one last link to the past, but it’s clear the Phillies we knew are gone, and the next year or two (or more) are going to be a difficult transition.

I didn’t mention Ryan Howard because when you read a quote like this, as Amaro told a local radio station just before the holidays…

“We’ve talked to Ryan,” Amaro said in an interview with 97.5 The Fanatic’s Mike Missanelli on Friday afternoon. “And I told him that in our situation it would probably bode better for the organization not with him but without him. With that said if he’s with us, then we’ll work around him. We’ll hope he puts up the kind of numbers that we hope he can and we’ll see where it goes from there.”

…then it deserves its own section.

When your general manager says the team is better off without you and that if you’re still in town, then they will “work around [you],” well, it’s clear you’re definitely gone. Or, at least, will be at some point, since he’s not been moved yet. You can live with an aging Utley, because he’s still a solid player with no obvious successor. You can’t keep Howard around because he’s a negative for a National League club and each plate appearance that goes to him takes one away from Maikel Franco or Cody Asche or Darin Ruf. None are going to be the next great Phillies first baseman, but there’s value in simply removing an aging, ineffective Howard from the equation, if only emotionally.

I hardly need to remind you of how difficult it’s going to be for the Phillies to actually make a Howard move, because you know all the reasons why. Instead, let’s play a game. Let’s find Howard a new home. Would any team bother with the roster spot? Is there actually a place where he could be of value? Maybe this will be fun. Unless you’re a Phillies fan, of course. Then it won’t be much fun at all.

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Joe Smith had a favorite team growing up. As is the case for most players, his allegiances changed when he began playing professional baseball. Smith was drafted by the Mets and has gone on to play for the Indians and now the Angels.

According to the side-arming reliever, the change in rooting interests goes beyond the company name on the paychecks being cashed. The logo on your laundry matters, but it’s not the only thing.

“You’re no longer an outsider looking in, so you become more a fan of the game,” said Smith.” You become a fan of people in the game. You get to know guys and find out who is a good person as well as a good player. Instead of being a Cubs fan, like I was when I was younger, now I’m more like, ‘What’s a cool ballpark to go to?’ and ‘Who am I excited to watch play in this series?’

Sometimes the players you’re excited to see play end up beating you. Smith has good career numbers – a 2.78 ERA over 515 relief outings – but like every pitcher, he knows what it feels like to be humbled. That doesn’t mean he can’t appreciate greatness. Read the rest of this entry »

Trades don’t get a lot cleaner than the deal we just recently saw between the Mariners and the Padres. The Mariners needed a left-handed semi-regular outfielder, and had relievers to spare. The Padres needed a reliever, and had left-handed semi-regular outfielders to spare. So the two agreed to swap Seth Smith and Brandon Maurer, and they’re both easy, simple fits. Smith joins Justin Ruggiano in a right-field platoon. Maurer adds another big arm to a team that needed a big arm more than it needed an occasional pinch-hitter.

Just by talent, Maurer is the more intriguing of the two players. With the Mariners, he frustrated as a starting pitcher, then flourished when bumped to relief. All of his stuff played up, and if the Padres keep Maurer in the bullpen, there’s no reason to think he can’t be a big help right away. Out of the Mariner bullpen in 2014, Maurer finished with 38 strikeouts and five walks, and two of those walks were intentional. Of the 209 relievers who threw at least 30 innings, Maurer wound up with the second-lowest unintentional walk rate, and he struck out a quarter of the batters he faced.

A useful statistic is strikeout rate minus walk rate. It holds greater significance than the more familiar strikeout-to-walk ratio. Last year’s bullpen leader in the statistic, naturally, was Aroldis Chapman. Maurer ranked 25th, placing him in the top 12 percent. He was tied with another recent Padres bullpen acquisition, Shawn Kelley. Maurer ranked ahead of names like Glen Perkins and Tyler Clippard. It’s pretty well established that Maurer can be good in relief. He’s a guy with future closer potential.

As a reliever-for-outfielder swap, the trade’s fair. Where it gets really interesting is if the Padres decide to try Maurer as a starter again. In Seattle, he’d had the door all but closed on the possibility. But the Padres say they don’t yet know how Maurer is going to be used, in the short-term or in the long-term. Probably, he’ll end up a reliever, but he’s just 24 years old, in a new organization. And though the Mariners grew frustrated by Maurer’s lack of progress out of the rotation, he shares a lot in common with a member of the current Padres staff, who was sold cheaply by the A’s.

The Padres picked up Tyson Ross in November 2012, giving up Andy Parrino and Andrew Werner. Parrino is a player of no consequence, and Werner hasn’t pitched in the majors since. Though Ross was inconsistent with the A’s, the Padres have turned him into a reliable front-of-the-rotation starter. That’s not an easy thing to do — if it were, it would happen a lot more often — but you can see where Ross changed, and you can see how Maurer might fit a similar profile.

Both Ross and Maurer are right-handed. One’s listed at 6-foot-5, 225 pounds, and the other’s listed at 6-5, 220. They’ve got powerful fastballs that can get into the mid-90s as a starter. Ross and Maurer have also shown powerful sliders, but early on they struggled to find a consistent weapon against lefties. As a starter with Oakland, Ross threw a fastball averaging 92 miles per hour, and a slider at 86. He occasionally dabbled with a changeup at 86. As a starter with Seattle, Maurer threw a fastball averaging 92 miles per hour, and a slider at 86. He dabbled with a changeup at 85, and a curveball at 74.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

For the American League version of this same exercise, click here.

The final page has been ripped from the old calendar, and 2015 is finally upon us. Before “The Offseason – Phase II” kicks in for earnest next week, let’s again take a look at some leftover 2014 data over this extended weekend. This time, let’s take a look at the offensive ball-in-play (BIP) frequency and production leaders and laggards in the National League.

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