What is the best way to attack Adam Jones? The answer would seemingly be to avoid the strike zone. The Orioles outfielder walked just 19 times in 682 plate appearances – that’s a 2.8 walk-rate, folks – and his 56.5 Swing% was the highest in the American League. His 42.1 O-Swing% was topped only by Salvador Perez.

Unfortunately for the opposition, while Jones chases pitchers’ pitches, he also chases pitchers by getting hits on some of those pitches. His 63.0 O-Contact% isn’t particularly high, but that says more about his proclivity to sometimes chase pitches in a different area code. If it’s close enough to the zone, he has a knack for getting knocks.

In the words of David Price, “I don’t think there’s a pitch Adam Jones doesn’t think he can hit, and he might be right.” An American League pitching coach offered a similar perspective, saying “Adam Jones will swing at a ball that bounces in the dirt and he’ll also swing at a ball that’s neck high. The difference between him and other guys who do that is he’s like Vladimir Guerrero – he can hit those pitches. One time this year he lined a ball back through the middle on a pitch that was six feet high. It was ridiculous.” Read the rest of this entry »

The numbers – at least some of them – suggested the Tigers would win Game 2. Justin Verlander was on the mound with a record of 7-0 and a 2.84 ERA in eight starts at Camden Yards. His record in seven ALDS starts was 4-0 with a 1.79 ERA. Baltimore starter Wei-Yin Chen had a 4.91 ERA in two career starts against Detroit and had never pitched in the postseason.

There was also perception. While not without flaws, the Tigers are a superstar-laden club capable of turning it on at any time. The Orioles – you know the refrain by now – aren’t as good as their record and destined to fall to earth.

Of course, this is baseball. Verlander out-pitched Chen, but the story often goes well beyond the starting pitchers. And while Detroit’s all-too-predictable bullpen implosion is going to get the most ink, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that a resilient team was once again resilient. This game wasn’t only about the Tigers losing.

I wrote it last night and it bears repeating: The Orioles are good. This is not a statement based on a two-game sample, nor is it bandwagon jumping. I predicted a postseason berth for Buck Showalter’s team in March and they certainly held up their end of the bargain. The team no one seems to respect is now 98-66.

According to writers covering the ALDS, Orioles fans aren’t off base in complaining their team doesn’t get the credit they deserve. Everyone I queried was in accord with that belief. Lack of star power, particularly in the starting rotation, was a common theme. Also mentioned was market. Baltimore isn’t Boston or New York.

As for projections and how the Orioles got to this point – one win from the ALCS – allow me to say something atypical of a FanGraphs article: Read the rest of this entry »

Pitch Mike Trout high and hard. You might damn well be sick of reading about this. I couldn’t even blame you, but you have to understand the nugget that we’re sitting on, here. It’s unusual that we know about such a stark vulnerability. It also happens to belong to the best player in baseball, a player we’ve written so many thousands of words about here before, and that player is in the playoffs now, looking to lead his team to a World Series. Pitch Mike Trout high and hard. The report’s been known for months, but to me it’s still endlessly fascinating to see how pitchers and teams make use of the information. This trend is pretty clear — the table below shows Trout’s month-by-month rates of high fastballs seen:

If we’ve been able to identify something, you’d better believe Major League Baseball has been able to identify that something, so Trout in the second half saw more high fastballs than anybody else, by a few percentage points. And what happened? Well, Trout remained pretty great, but after leading baseball in the first half with a 186 wRC+, second-half Trout dropped to 141, even with Jose Altuve. His walks went down and his strikeouts went up, and while he was seeing about 41% high fastballs, that means he was seeing 59% non-high-fastballs. That’s where Trout feasted. He’s going to win the league MVP, and he deserves it.

Thursday night, Trout played in the playoffs, as the Angels and Royals kicked off their ALDS. Starting for Kansas City was Jason Vargas, and that raised an interesting question. All right, pitch Trout high and hard. But what if you don’t have good high, hard stuff? What if you’re, say, Jason Vargas? One wondered how the Royals would approach Trout, and, now that we look back, the Royals approached Trout like the numbers say you should approach Trout. I have to note that Sam Miller has already written about this, very well, but he cheated by writing at night like some kind of hard and disciplined worker. It’s like, work during work hours, right? Let’s pretend like Miller didn’t beat me to the punch, and review Trout’s five trips to the plate. He finished 0-for-4 with a walk, by the way. The Royals won!

Read the rest of this entry »

What do you know about the Los Angeles Dodgers? We know they’re the glamor franchise in baseball right now. They have the enormous TV deal and the largest payroll in the league. They just won their second straight National League West crown. They’re good, as one expects such an expensive club to be.

Expensive teams tend to employ well-known players, and the Dodgers don’t want for names. But the way they go about their business is, in my mind, something of a mystery.

The Dodgers have a great rotation and sort of a terrible bullpen. Their offense is good but is it best in baseball good? According to wRC+, that is exactly where it ranks. Their non-pitching offensive players put up a 116 wRC+, tied with the Pirates for best in baseball.

Despite playing a ballpark that is actually favorable to home runs, the high-output Dodgers offense didn’t hit many bombs. They don’t have a prototypical power bat in the middle of their order, until you remember Adrian Gonzalez slugged 27 home runs this year and Matt Kemp put up a 140 wRC+ this season. As a team, they hit 134 home runs, fewer than the Mariners and just two more than the Giants, a team they outscored by almost 50 runs.

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Stephen Strasburg was hyped from before he was ever drafted, and when he made his big-league debut, he captured the national interest like few other prospects ever have or ever will. But a hyped Strasburg meant there would be a post-hyped Strasburg, and while people still recognize that he has electric, occasionally unhittable stuff, it’s felt before like something’s been missing. Maybe it’s on us for setting our expectations too high, or maybe it’s on us for not being patient enough, but Strasburg felt incomplete, and it wasn’t only the fans who felt so.

Last spring, a big-league pitcher remarked that his teammates would rather face Strasburg than Jordan Zimmermann. Against Strasburg, they were more comfortable, and while his numbers were clearly good, the point is that Strasburg didn’t feel like a whole pitcher.

And now? Now he feels a lot more like a whole pitcher. Some of it is just clearing 200 innings, but this year’s version of Strasburg has taken a step forward. This year’s version of Strasburg is maybe the ace of a staff full of aces, as he’s crossed more tasks off a shrinking to-do list.

Here’s the simplest way to put it: Strasburg, in 2014, threw more strikes. In 2012 and 2013, he threw strikes about 63% of the time. The average for a National League starter was about 64%. This season, Strasburg threw strikes about 67% of the time, one of the higher figures in the league. So, where Strasburg used to walk 7-8% of opposing hitters, this year he walked 5%, which is particularly low given his frequency of getting into deep counts.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

You might hear a lot about how Pablo Sandoval is better in the postseason over the next week. His career .333/.372/.609 batting line and a seminal three-homer performance are easy enough to point to. The problem, of course, is that we’re talking about 94 plate appearances, the equivalent of about three weeks of regular season play. Not a great sample.

On the other hand, somewhere around 100-150 plate appearances, certain things do actually accrue enough sample to become meaningful. Things like swing and contact rates, since they are on a per-pitch basis and we get close to four pitches per average plate appearance, tend to tell us if a player has changed in a meaningful way over a short period of time. Ground ball and flyball rates can do the same.

So let’s pretend that Pablo Sandoval’s postseason history is the first month of a season. Has he changed? Does he do anything significantly different in the postseason? Because if he has, than maybe we can smile knowingly and pass on Sandoval’s postseason OPS. Because we know some of the underlying skills look different once the lights shine brighter.

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At some point people are going to come around to the fact that the Baltimore Orioles are good. They finished the regular season 96-66 and I’m sorry, you don’t do that with smoke and mirrors.

Tonight, the Orioles smoked the Tigers 12-3 in Game One of the ALDS. They did so with power, an 8-run eighth, and four innings of exemplary bullpen usage. There’s no point in recapping what you watched on TV, but here are a few perspectives from post-game interviews, as well as relevant comments from Wednesday’s media session.

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Victor Martinez struck out once every 15.26 plate appearances this year, the best mark in the league. He fanned just 42 times, making him the first player to hit at least 30 home runs with 45-or-fewer strikeouts since Barry Bonds turned the trick in 2004. V-Mart’s .409 OBP led the American League and was second to Andrew McCutchen’s .410 overall.

Finding a way to contain Martinez – and Miguel Cabrera – is a priority for the Orioles. Martinez struck out twice tonight – something he did just three times during the regular season – but he also went deep, as did Cabrera.

In the opinion of an American League pitching coach I spoke to earlier this week, there is no one way to get them out. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, during Kansas City’s improbable 9-8 wild-card defeat of Oakland (box), Royals left-hander Brandon Finnegan recorded undoubtedly the highest-leverage innings of his very brief major-league career in the highest-leverage game of his club’s season. The results were impressive: 2.1 IP, 9 TBF, 3 K, 1 BB, 1 H, 1 R, 63 xFIP-. For those unfamiliar with Finnegan previously, his performance was surely a revelation. Even for those who possessed some intimate knowledge of his college career at TCU, the outcome was likely a minor surprise, too — if for no other reason than it’s rare for any draftee to contribute meaningfully to his organization’s parent club just a few months after having become a professional.

Between his seven regular-season and (now) single postseason appearance, Finnegan is among that frustrating class of pitcher for whom (a) there exists some manner of major-league data but also (b) not so much that the fielding-independent stats which most directly inform run prevention (strikeouts, walks, ground balls) have become reliable yet.

Notably, though, there’s a collection of what one might call intermediary fielding-independent numbers — that is, metrics which (a) inform the metrics which inform run prevention but also (b) become reliable more quickly than either strikeout or walk rate (which require 70 and 170 batters faced, respectively, according to work done by Russell Carleton). Specifically, I’m thinking of these intermediary fielding-independent numbers: fastball velocity (which is useful insofar as it becomes reliable almost immediately), swinging-strike rate (which is predictive of strikeout rate), and first-pitch-strike rate (which is predictive of walk rate). Precisely how much more quickly the latter two become reliable than the stats they inform, I’m unable to say. The object of this brief exercise, however, is less about Ultimate Precision and more about attempting to extract useful information from a limited sample.

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Do you guys know Jaack? That’s not a very good introduction. We’ve run live game chats during the wild-card playoffs the previous two nights, and Jaack is the screen name of at least one participating commenter. This is Wednesday’s live chat, and this is Jaack, at 11:05pm EDT:

Comment From Jaack
There needs to be an article about how much better last night’s game was. Like inning by inning breakdown.

Jaack’s the best. Thank you, Jaack! Following is such a breakdown.

Tuesday’s game, of course, set an impossible standard. It feels like it’s an all-time kind of playoff game, and while I’m fully aware of recency bias, I felt the same way after Rangers/Cardinals Game 6 in 2011, and that one’s stood up. We can debate how amazing it was to watch the A’s and the Royals, but there’s no debate that it was some kind of amazing. So there was no chance at all that the Giants and Pirates would follow that show with at least an equivalent show of their own, but Wednesday was a total dud. The saving grace was that Madison Bumgarner pitched and was awesome, but for the most part he was awesome without any danger, and when the outcome feels decided, the entertainment value plummets.

This isn’t about the quality of the baseball. This is about the quality of the show. We already know that Tuesday’s show was several times better, but now let’s put some actual data to it because what else do you have to do for the next few minutes? If you started reading this, you can finish reading this.

Read the rest of this entry »

So, bullpens. We can all agree they’re pretty important, yeah? In the postseason, the importance of the bullpen is magnified. It’s on national television, everything is magnified. Every pitch seems more important. Every swing seems more important. Every decision made by a manager seems more important. Each of these things inches a team one step closer to a having World Series title, or one step closer to having tee times.

But also, as our own Dave Cameron has pointed out, the importance of the bullpen is magnified in the postseason because, strategically, the role of a bullpen simply becomes more important the more times you work through a batting order. Relievers are often the most effective pitchers on a team and, at this point in the season, it doesn’t make sense to save or protect your arms. You use what you’ve got when you need outs.
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