On Tuesday evening, Clayton Kershaw gave up a home run to Matt Adams. It was a big home run. Wanna know how I know it was a big home run? Because Matt Adams did this:

The graphic which appears during that replay is annoying, but also helpful, because it shows the real reason why Adams’ homer was a big homer. It was a big homer because it gave the Cardinals a 3-2 lead late in an playoff game with the opportunity to eliminate a team that had the best pitcher in the world on the mound. The Cardinals went on to win, of course, and the Dodgers’ season is now over.

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Of late, Major League Baseball has been fairly aggressive in adopting new rules to attempt to improve the game. We have instant replay now, at least for some plays and some calls. Runners aren’t allowed to run over catchers at home plate anymore. The league is even experimenting with a pitch clock in the Arizona Fall League, which could eventually lead to a reduction in the amount of time that pitchers are allowed to stand around doing nothing. The game is great, but it can still be improved upon, and I’m glad to see MLB working to try and continually make it better.

And after what we’ve seen in the playoffs over the last week, I think it’s time for Major League Baseball to consider another rule change. It’s time to officially take check-swing strike calls away from the home plate umpire.

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In Game 1 of the NLDS, Don Mattingly left in Clayton Kershaw to absorb a beating in part because he didn’t trust his bullpen. In Game 2, he lifted Zack Greinke, only to watch veteran J.P. Howell give a lead away. In Game 3, he rode Hyun-jin Ryu as far as he felt was realistic (given that Ryu had missed weeks with a shoulder injury), then saw Scott Elbert kick it away. In Game 4, a short-rest Kershaw was outstanding up until the moment he wasn’t, with Mattingly trying to push Kershaw through that seventh inning in order to turn it over to Kenley Jansen.

Each of these decisions were defensible in some way. And each one blew up in Mattingly’s face. The manager is getting pummeled for that, because that’s how sports work, and there’s a non-zero chance he doesn’t survive the winter, fairly or not. But the focus on Mattingly’s choices perhaps overlooks a more crucial problem: Man, how bad was that bullpen? How does this even happen? Read the rest of this entry »

Dan Kantrovitz is one of the reasons the St. Louis Cardinals are good. More so, he’s one of the reasons they promise to remain good. The 36-year-old former Ivy League shortstop has been the club’s Director of Scouting since January 2012. Under his watch, the Cardinals have drafted Michael Wacha, Marco Gonzales and a number of soon-to-reach-St. Louis prospects.

Kantrovitz’s background is atypical of most scouting directors. Prior to his first stint with the Cardinals [2004-2008], he earned an undergraduate degree from Brown and a master’s degree in statistics from Harvard. He was in charge of international scouting for the Oakland A’s from 2009-2011.

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Kantrovitz on economizing through the draft: “We view the draft as a mechanism to save money. That may seem counter intuitive – it’s a spending environment – but its arguably the best bang for your buck in any area of procurement. The more you spend on the draft, assuming it’s a disciplined approach, the more our club might be able to save down the road in the free-agent market.

“Fortunately, our ownership has been very supportive and allowed us to spend up to the five-percent overage in each year of the current CBA since the 2012 draft. It’s not a new idea, but if we play our cards right and draft a future mid or top of the rotation guy, for example, that would save our club quite a bit of money on the free-agent market. That’s money that our GM can allocate to another area, or a more abundant, cheaper, position. Likewise, hitting on one of those “low-ceiling, high-floor” college players on day 2 or 3 and having him turn into a super-utility type has plenty of surplus value as well.

“Just trying to find athletes, or up-the-middle guys… I’m asked that a lot but we don’t really look at it that way. It might be limiting for us if we stick to a rigid strategy that is not data-driven. What we’re trying to do with our draft is optimize it. We want to figure out how it’s going to save us the most money down the road and be the most productive for us. The profile of a player that is going to save us money down the road is based on quite a bit of analysis…and it is rarely obvious. It is also a lot easier said than done, because you still have to execute it and hit on certain players. I should add that our strategy being based on saving money in the future doesn’t mean we shy away from the high-upside guys. After all, if they pan out, they would save us the most money of all.”

On how Oakland prepared him for his current job: “First, just working in their front office and being around guys like Billy [Beane], David [Forst] and Farhan [Zaidi] on a daily basis, was an incredible environment to learn from. They’re some of the best people I’ve been around, plus they already knew the international market when I was hired, so I was able to absorb quite a bit and hit the ground running. In terms of working on the international side, I think that is the best training any scout can get. You write-up a ton of reports and you have to make a judgment on players without stats, third-party information or really any prior information on a player.  Its pure, unadulaterated scouting that humbles you very quickly, because you are wrong a lot.” Read the rest of this entry »

There is so much more to managing a baseball team that what we see during the games. We only see the line-ups, the batting order, and the pitching changes; we don’t see the human interactions, the coaching, and all of the work that goes into keeping so many large personalities pointed in the right direction. Managing a baseball team is about a lot more than just in-game strategy.

But in-game strategy is part of the job, and on Tuesday night, Matt Williams failed at that part of the job in the most important game of his team’s season. And while we cannot know what would have happened if different decisions had been made, we do know that maybe the best team in baseball just got bounced in the first round in part due to a series of decisions that strain credulity.

Let’s just walk through the pivotal seventh inning. Bryce Harper had just tied the game in the top half of the inning, so the score was tied at 2-2 with the top of the Giants order coming up. The Giants #1 and #2 hitters both bat left-handed, so Williams countered with Matt Thornton, the team’s only remaining left-handed reliever. Perfectly logical.

Thornton got a groundout from Gregor Blanco, then gave up a single to Joe Panik. That put the go-ahead run on base for Buster Posey, the Giants best hitter. The Giants best right-handed hitter. Here is what Buster Posey has done against left-handed pitchers in his career.

631 at-bats, 210 hits, 53 doubles, 2 triples, 32 home runs, 61 walks, 77 strikeouts.

That’s a .333/.393/.578 batting line, which when you account for his home park, translates to a 168 wRC+, meaning that Posey’s vs LHP performance has been 68 percent better than a league average hitter. Do you want some context for that? In 2012, when Miguel Cabrera won the Triple Crown, he had a 166 wRC+. Posey’s performance against left-handers has basically been the equal of the game’s most feared hitter, when he’s having a great year, even by his own standards.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

In the Dodgers/Cardinals game Monday night, Dale Scott served as the home-plate umpire, and when the game was over Matt Kemp couldn’t help but complain to the media that Scott had been terrible. Umpires have had better games, and umpires have had worse games, but one could at least understand Kemp’s frustration, given what happened to him in the top of the ninth. And what happened to Kemp in the top of the ninth really captures the whole problem with the human-called strike zone. Nothing you’re going to read below is going to be new to you, because this has been the problem forever, but the specific sequence with Kemp was too incredible not to acknowledge. In not writing about Kemp’s situation specifically, I’ll begin by writing about Kemp’s situation specifically.

This post might have my favorite-ever .gif. At least, it’s my favorite .gif so far of the month. I love it because of how much I hate it.

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Over the last month-plus in these pages, Kiley McDaniel has released the first four of his 30 offseason organizational prospect lists — designed, those particular posts, to sort out the best prospects in baseball according (predominantly) to overall future value. What follows is a different thing than that — designed to identify not baseball’s top prospects, but rather the rookie-eligible players* who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). What it is not is an attempt to account for any kind of future value — for which reason it omits certain players (like Byron Buxton, for example) who very obviously exhibit a great deal of promise.

*In this case, defined as any player who’s recorded fewer than 130 at-bats or 50 innings — which is to say, there’s been no attempt to identify each player’s time spent on the active roster, on account of that’s a super tedious endeavor.

To assemble the following collection of 10 prospects, what I’ve done first is to utilize the Steamer 600 projections made available today at the site. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Players eligible for the list either (a) enter their age-26 season or lower in 2015, alternatively, (b) were signed as international free agents this offseason.

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With a 4-1 victory over the Giants last night, the Nationals breathed a little life into their hopes of advancing past the NDLS. Tonight, they look to win another game in San Francisco, and the pitching match-up certainly looks to be in their favor, as Gio Gonzalez takes on Ryan Vogelsong. Gonzalez, however, is not exactly known for pitching deep into ballgames, which brings up an interesting question for Matt Williams tonight: would he be willing to use Stephen Strasburg as his first option out of the bullpen?

Due to the scheduled off-days both on Sunday and tomorrow, the Nationals have the option of starting either Strasburg or Jordan Zimmermann on full rest in a potential Game Five. Zimmermann shut down the Giants on Saturday, finishing one out shy of a complete game, and was actually the team’s best starter this season, even though he doesn’t have Strasburg’s raw stuff. The availability of Zimmmermann to start Game Five creates an interesting option for the Nationals to use Strasburg out of the bullpen in order to give the team their best chance of getting to that game, and Matt Williams said yesterday that Strasburg was available in relief in an “extreme emergency” situation.

Interestingly, Kilgore also wrote this in a separate piece: Read the rest of this entry »

During the 2012 postseason, I wrote this post explaining how revenue generated by postseason tickets sales is shared among the league, postseason teams and players on postseason teams. The basic distribution formulas are established by MLB Rules and the collective bargaining agreement, and haven’t changed. But let’s review to make sure we’re all on the same page.
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The story of last night’s NLDS Game 3 is almost certainly going to be about how the Dodger bullpen, which was known to be awful, was awful. After Pedro Baez in Game 1, and J.P. Howell in Game 2, it was Scott Elbert’s turn in Game 3. Other than Kenley Jansen, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is literally nothing Don Mattingly can do that isn’t going to blow up in his face. He could be the best manager in the world (well, probably not) or the worst, and we might never know, because the relievers he has at his disposal just keep on failing. (Yes, it was the right call to take out Hyun-jin Ryu, in his first start back from shoulder issues, when he did.)

Somewhat lost in that is the reality that if the Dodgers had merely managed to put up more than a single run against John Lackey and friends, they might not have needed to actually rely so heavily on the leaky pen. There’s a not-small part of that which is on umpire Dale Scott, but you can also only put so much on questionable umpiring. There’s a whole lot more you can put on things like… wow, did Yasiel Puig strike out seven times in a row? Read the rest of this entry »