Chris Tillman’s 2014 has a pretty great storyline. Approaching the end of July, Tillman had an average ERA and below-average peripherals, with 51 walks to go with 83 strikeouts. That’s not at all what the Orioles were looking for, and then all of a sudden Tillman turned his year around. Over the dozen starts he had remaining, he allowed 23 runs, with 15 walks and 67 strikeouts. Last week, Tillman was reasonably effective against the Tigers, with six whiffs in five innings. People who look at the Orioles’ rotation don’t see an ace, but Tillman’s the closest they’ve got, and he’s pitched at that level for a couple of months.

So, Tillman’s had a great second half of the year, just like the whole team around him has, and that’s one thing you could talk about. But in October, people love to focus on the matchups, and Tillman’s about to go up against the Royals, who made a name for themselves in the Wild Card game by running all over the place. The perception of the Royals, now, is that they’ll run you to death if you give them the chance. And yet, Chris Tillman doesn’t give runners chances. This’ll be a fascinating matchup for a number of reasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

You probably know that MIT’s Sloan School of Management puts on a sports analytics conference in Boston every spring, but you may not know that they also maintain a blog, which does Q&As with interesting people from the sports world, and when they can’t find anyone who matches that description, me.

All-around good guy Zachary Levine and I spent some time talking yesterday, and the transcript of that discussion is now up on the SSAC blog. Here’s the first question and answer, to whet your appetite.

Q: You wrote about the Nationals’ bad bullpen decisions and it’s definitely been a theme that we’ve seen in the playoffs over and over again. Twitter has played a big part in this, but it seems like we’re questioning what the managers are doing every night. To put it (over)-simply is there a chance that we’re right? Is there a chance that the combination of probably somewhat better analytical skills and wisdom of crowds outweigh what is to be gained by being on the inside?

A: I certainly don’t want to say that the fans know more than the managers do. They have information that we don’t have that is useful in what decision to make. Certainly they know the quality of the guy’s arm if before the game he was saying his elbow was injured. If there’s some factor that the public isn’t aware of, that could be a major determining factor in whether a guy should be used or not.

At the same time, there is clearly a bias that comes with being with these guys and seeing how you used them in the regular season that carries over to the postseason. That could be detrimental. If we look at the determination of many major league managers in managing in October the same way they did in the regular season, it seems that there is a disconnect between what we as outsiders or the front office would see as being important in certain situations and what they see. I wondered if being that close to the players and seeing the success of rigid roles, which in the regular season, there’s probably a good reason for them in terms of limiting usage, but in the postseason when there’s no such thing as a low-leverage situation anymore, I wonder if the familiarity and the success that the managers had with their rigid roles during the regular season actually becomes a problem.

You can read the whole thing over at their blog.

Since it became clear that the 2014 Yankees weren’t very good, a lot of people in our chats started asking about the 2015 Yankees. Specifically, a lot of people started asking about the shortstop for the 2015 Yankees, since they’re not going to have Derek Jeter, in a different way from how the 2014 Yankees didn’t really have Derek Jeter. A name I kept arriving at was J.J. Hardy — he was due to be a free agent, and he’s pretty good, and he’d cost plenty without costing plenty. He seemed like a good option for a Yankees team that might not want to break the bank. Also, he’s not an option anymore.

In the break between playoff series, the Orioles have signed Hardy to a multi-year extension:

Source: Hardy deal 3 years, $40 mil with $6.5 mil deferred. Vesting option 4th year based on ABs #orioles

— Roch Kubatko (@masnRoch) October 9, 2014

In re-signing Hardy, the Orioles are getting for about market value a player who is no longer young but who is not yet a problem. That sentence is all the analysis you need, but now let’s get into some details you might want.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the postseason of the underdog. The Angels, Dodgers, Tigers, and Nationals were all bounced in the first round. Both wild card teams advanced, combining to lose one game in the process, despite having burned their best starting pitchers in the play-in game. One of the remaining division winners won just 90 games. These are not the League Championship Series many people expected, and with the little guys advancing in each division series, we should be in for some pretty even match-ups. At least, that’s what one would think.

But if you look over at our Playoff Odds page, our depth chart forecasts don’t exactly see it that way. This is how those projections look right now, before the start of either LCS.

Read the rest of this entry »

As you’ve probably heard by now, Matt Williams had a bad seventh inning on Tuesday night. Dave Cameron took Williams’ bullpen maneuvers apart nicely in his Just a Bit Outside column at Fox Sports. At the risk of putting words in his mouth, he said that Williams leaving Matt Thornton in the game to face Buster Posey was inexplicable.

It’s not quite that. There is a certain logic to what Williams tried. It may not be good logic, but looked at the right way, you can sorta understand what he was doing.

Now, this post is not meant as a rebuttal of Cameron’s piece. If I got into a saber-war with Dave Cameron, I’d fully expect to lose. I don’t like to lose, so the heck with that. Consider this more of a supplement to his work, an added angle to what he’s already provided.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re about to enter the third winter with the qualifying offer system in effect, and we’ve learned a few things so far. We know that of the 22 offers made in the first two years, exactly zero have been accepted. We’ve seen a few high-profile disasters, namely Stephen Drew and Kendrys Morales, and a few others (Kyle Lohse, Ervin Santana, etc.) who had to wait until spring training had already started to find a new home. Now, we know something more specific about this year’s offer. It’ll be worth $15.3 million, 8.5% more than last year’s $14.1 million, which is set by finding the average of the sport’s 125 best-paid players.

With that in mind, and with 26 of the 30 teams already looking ahead to 2015, it’s time to take a look at potential qualifying offers. Is this the year someone finally accepts one? You know the rules, probably. A team must extend an offer by the fifth day following the World Series, and a player has a seven-day window in which to accept after that. This really does get done pretty quickly, and probably too quickly. In February, Dave Cameron put forth an idea to improve the system, suggesting that removing the deadline for players to accept would limit the amount of offers put forth to questionable players. A valid idea, one I liked, and one that has not been accepted by the game, so here we are.

Read the rest of this entry »

The divisional round of the playoffs is in the books, and the sport is taking a deep breath for a couple of days before the final four tournament gets underway. Both wild card survivors live on, the team with the best record in each league has been sent home, and all viable regular season MVP candidates suddenly have some unexpected free time on their hands. In fact, the two likely frontrunners, Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw, were among the primary culprits for their respective teams’ defeats.

Kershaw, most visibly, had a couple of really bad 7th innings, and Trout pulled the ol’ 1 for 15 as the Angels were swept by the Royals. It’s small sample size theater, obviously – these guys are generational greats, no matter what happened in the 2014 playoffs. In the details of Trout’s exceptional 2014 season, however, lie the imprint of some worrisome trends that might be signs of long-term trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether or not you believe baseball games take too long, whether or not you believe they’re trending in a bad direction, I think everybody can agree that your average game includes too much time during which nothing is happening. So to want to cut down on that is noble, and baseball’s put together a Pace of Game Committee to try to fit these things back under three hours. Already, they’re testing out a variety of proposed tweaks, and while obviously nothing is yet official for the major-league game, here’s something we could see during the regular season in the near future:

Intentional walks will no longer include the pitcher lobbing four balls outside the strike zone. Instead, the manager will signal to the home-plate umpire and the batter will take first base.

So, automatic intentional walks. People have talked about this one for a while. Tuesday night, Aaron Barrett pitched.

Read the rest of this entry »

When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades.  There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades.   -Kiley

As the entire internet seems to know, Arizona Fall League kicked off yesterday and I scooted over to Salt River Fields at Talking Stick for the nightcap that featured an Archie Bradley v. Tyler Glasnow pitching matchup.

Read the rest of this entry »

During the regular season, the Dodgers went 23-4 in games started by Clayton Kershaw, and 20-1 since the beginning of June. Kershaw and the Dodgers started to feel invincible, so, naturally, with Kershaw in the playoffs the Dodgers went 0-2, their year ending on a Tuesday in St. Louis. Plenty of things happened in Game 4 that played a role in determining the outcome, but this tells an awful lot of the story:

Kershaw’s final pitch of 2014 was a home run that turned a two-run lead into a one-run deficit. Under ordinary circumstances, that would just be a thing that happened. However, Kershaw had gone beyond 100 pitches, on short rest, in the playoffs. Despite consensus opinion, the Dodgers did have a bullpen, and a loss meant their season was over. So a tremendous number of people now believe Kershaw shouldn’t have pitched in the seventh, that Don Mattingly hung on a few minutes too long. And, certainly, we here have talked an awful lot about the need to be aggressive with bullpen usage in October. To talk this particular case through, from both sides, I’ve enlisted the help of my own brain. Usually it likes to sit my posts out, but this is a special circumstance.

Read the rest of this entry »