I attended the Sports Analytics Innovation Summit in San Francisco last week. On Tuesday, I wrote about the presentations that focused on player training, development and performance. You can read that article here. Today’s post will discuss how teams and leagues use analytics to boost ticket sales and enhance the in-game experience. As with the performance presentations, NFL and NBA teams were most strongly represented.

• Using Analytics To Define The Ticketing Experience: Russ Stanley, Vice President of Ticket Sales and Service, San Francisco Giants. This was the one marketing presentation from an MLB team. The Giants have 30,000 full season ticket holders. They do not offer partial season ticket plans. Season ticket holders are capped at 30,000 because the Giants are required to have 12,000 or so tickets available for MLB for the postseason and season ticket holders are guaranteed postseason tickets. On any given game day, 15,000 of the 30,000 season tickets exchange hands through StubHub. Stanley said that the secondary marketing place is critical for season ticket holders because they are required to by all 81 home games.

  This season, the Giants started experimenting with a repurposing system where season ticket holders let the Giants re-sell tickets they can’t use, and the proceeds from this second sale are split 50-50. The Giants pioneered the use of dynamic pricing for single-game tickets with ticket analytics company Qcue. (I explained the ins and outs of dynamic and variable pricing in this post.) The 12,000 non-season ticket holder seats are subject to dynamic pricing from the time they go on sale until the game starts. On the day of the game, the prices could change 400 times. The season ticket holder price for each seat is the dynamic pricing floor (so as not to undercut the secondary market for season ticket holders.

  The Giants have aggressively used dynamic pricing to keep alive their sell-out streak — which dates to September 2010. Stanley admitted that the Giants have “left money on the table” to keep the sell-out streak alive because the ownership group likes the sell-out streak and because it builds a narrative of scarcity, and that helps with season ticket holder renewals. My thoughts: I was pleased to finally get a Giants executive to admit that the sell-out streak is itself a marketing ploy and has been somewhat contrived.

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There was a time last season that Zack Greinke was batting over .400. At that time, no other pitcher in baseball was batting over .300. So people had some fun with that, because it’s fun when a pitcher is helping himself. It pretty much never lasts. Greinke didn’t keep batting over .400. This year he’s down near .200. He’s a pitcher, and pitchers are bad hitters, and single-season pitcher hitting statistics are limited by miniature sample sizes. No longer do we think of Greinke as a guy who’s going to break records. But all the while, as Greinke’s numbers have bounced around, he’s genuinely improved. And he’s improved to the point where, now, Greinke might be a half-decent hitter, and I don’t mean relative to pitchers this time.

Since the start of the 2012 season, Greinke’s come up 173 times. There are 107 pitchers who have come up at least 50 times during that window. Greinke leads the sample in wRC+, by 27 points. He’s the only pitcher in there with an OBP over .300. He’s one of four pitchers with an ISO over .100, and the next-best OBP in that group is .243. Some people thought of Carlos Zambrano as a good-hitting pitcher, and he had a 57 wRC+, with 24 times as many strikeouts as walks. Yovani Gallardo gets similar treatment, and he has a 41 wRC+, with 12 times as many strikeouts as walks. Travis Wood? 47 wRC+, 22 times as many strikeouts as walks. Mike Leake? 57 wRC+, 12 times as many strikeouts as walks. Those considered “good-hitting pitchers” tend to be pitchers capable of hitting home runs. Greinke adds unlikely elements of discipline and bat control.

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For years, people have been writing “nothing good ever comes out of Cliff Lee trades” articles. I’m sure somewhere along the line, I wrote one too, and that’s mostly because, well, nothing really had. Justin Smoak was probably the best player to come out of any of those deals, and he isn’t any good. Jason Donald, Jason Knapp and Lou Marson didn’t amount to anything, nor has Blake Beavan. I don’t want to talk about Josh Lueke. Among Ruben Amaro’s many missteps, the 2009 deal that shipped off Lee to Seattle for the massive return of Tyson Gillies, Phillippe Aumont and J.C. Ramirez probably doesn’t get enough press.

For most of the last five-plus years — yes, really, it’s been that long — Carlos Carrasco was lumped in with those failures, too. In parts of four seasons with Cleveland (2009-11, ’13) he’d put up a 5.29 ERA and 4.48 FIP in 238.1 innings. He’s been DFA’d at least once, lost all of 2012 to Tommy John surgery, and served multiple suspensions for head hunting. While he won the fifth starter job out of camp this year, he was also sent to the bullpen in favor of Zach McAllister after four lousy starts.

At the time, his career ERA stood at 5.43. He had mediocre strikeout numbers, and the inexplicable combination of “gets both groundballs and home runs.” We’ve been writing stories about him here since at least 2008, and all we’d seen in that time was disappointment and absence. There was really little reason to think any of that was going to change. After all, it had already been five years of struggle since the trade.

Carrasco moved back into the rotation in August. Since then, he’s made eight starts. He’s allowed seven earned runs, and since four of them came in one game, that means he’s made seven starts allowing zero or one earned run, including Wednesday’s two-hit — neither of which left the infield — shutout of Houston. He’s got a 59/7 K/BB in that time. Is this finally the Carrasco Cleveland had waited so long to see? Let’s find out.

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Ken Rosenthal has an NL MVP vote this year, and the other day, he wrote about his thought process in regards to pitchers winning the award. He’d prefer to vote for a position player, but isn’t entirely against pitchers-as-MVPs, and he noted that a dominant starter who works deep into games doesn’t just affect the team on the day they pitch, as is commonly cited. Quoting from his column:

The one pro-Kershaw argument I do like – the one I recall making for Pedro Martinez in 1999 and 2000 – is that a dominant starting pitcher affects three games out of five. Kershaw averages more than 7 1/3 innings per start. Dodgers manager Don Mattingly can empty his bullpen the day before Kershaw pitches and manage a fully rested group the day after.

This does seem to be a potentially real benefit created by Kershaw that is not being accounted for anywhere in his own stat-line. While there is a lot of talk about players “making their teammates better”, this would be one actual place where it could exist, with a starting pitcher allowing his manager to reallocate his bullpen usage to the days around Kershaw, increasing their chances of winning on those days as well. This is the kind of thing that we wouldn’t capture by just looking at Kershaw’s performance.

But is it true? Rob Neyer was smart enough to realize that we should be able to find some data to test this theory, and so I bugged Jeff Zimmerman about it, and he was nice enough to query out the Dodgers’ bullpen usage on days before and after Kershaw pitched this season. Here are the results.

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One of the biggest stories of the season’s second half has been the historic decline of the Oakland Athletics. They are flirting with accomplishing the extremely difficult feat of having the best record in baseball at the All Star break, and then missing the playoffs. Winning the final two games of their pivotal series with the Seattle Mariners this past weekend has sharply decreased the likelihood of that worst case scenario, but the collapse has been stark nonetheless. It’s convenient to tie the A’s second half results to the departure of Yoenis Cespedes in the Jon Lester trade, but the reality is a bit more complicated than that. There are many factors in play, but arguably the foremost among them has been the precipitous fall of two of their key offensive players – Derek Norris and Brandon Moss. 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

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Let’s go back to 1920. Let’s look at starting pitchers who threw at least 75 innings in consecutive big-league seasons. Relative to last year, Jake Arrieta’s K-BB% has improved by 14 percentage points. That’s the fourth-greatest improvement within the sample. Relative to last year, Arrieta’s FIP- has improved by 64 points. That’s the single greatest improvement within the sample, edging out 2007-2008 Cliff Lee. This is what a breakout looks like. This is what maybe the biggest breakout looks like.

It’s up to you to determine whether or not Jake Arrieta is an ace, but he’s certainly generated ace-like results for the past several months, so if he’s not an ace yet, he’s on the right track. Six times already, he’s held an opponent hitless into the fifth. Three times, he’s held an opponent hitless into the seventh. Twice, he’s held an opponent hitless into the eighth. Arrieta’s flirted with history a few times, and while he hasn’t sealed the deal on an actual no-hitter, he’s at least earned greater familiarity and exposure. The Arrieta breakout, by now, is obvious. And more and more people are becoming aware of it.

So, we think we know what we have. How did this happen? How was Jake Arrieta built? Let’s condense his whole story into a blog post. Seems editorially responsible.

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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

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Jose Altuve accomplished something Tuesday night. He played in a major-league baseball game! Wow! And even more incredible than that, he broke the Astros’ single-season record for hits, previously held by Craig Biggio. There are still another two weeks left to play. Of course, not all hits are the same, and we don’t usually spend much time talking about single-season hit totals, but you might prefer this: Altuve’s been great. The hits are one indication. He’s been something in the vicinity of a five-win player, as a 24-year-old in the middle infield. That’s a long-term building block.

So when some people think Altuve, they think hits. When other people think Altuve, they think short jokes. It’s clear that, in order to become the player he is today, Altuve’s had to overcome considerable adversity. A lot of that is simply that players his size tend to get selected against. They receive fewer opportunities. But then there can also be issues on the field, even during opportunities. Maybe it’s more difficult to turn a double play. It’s certainly more difficult to snare a line drive. And there’s the matter of the strike zone. Umpires aren’t great with unusual strike zones, and Altuve’s, obviously, is lower than most.

According to the PITCHf/x settings, the lower part of Altuve’s zone is lower than the average zone by almost three inches. The higher part of Altuve’s zone is lower than the average zone by almost five inches. So you know where this is going, based on that sentence, and based on the headline. I think I put together this same exact post every season. It’s time now to reflect on the season’s highest called strikes to Jose Altuve.

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