Archive for Daily Graphings

Over the weekend, the ninth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference took place in Boston, and I was lucky enough to be invited to be part of the baseball panel — along with Sandy Alderson, Ben Lindbergh, Dan Brooks, and Jonah Keri — on Saturday morning. I enjoyed our conversation, but I’ll mostly leave it up to others to recap that conversation, since I’m likely a bit biased by being part of the panel. There were some other parts of the conference that I thought were worth discussing, however.

For instance, on Friday afternoon, Commissioner Manfred took the stage for an hour long interview with Brian Kenny. While the commissioner has been making the media rounds since taking over, and has established some talking points that he repeated during this conversation, there were also some interesting points made during the conversation. Among the things that stood out to me from Manfred’s comments, which I’m going to paraphrase below:

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You’re 11 years old. You toss your flattened “Piña Mango” Capri Sun pouch to the floor of your mother’s dog hair riddled Honda Odyssey and pull the door handle that activates the painfully slow automatic sliding door. As the door creeps along and the heat of the mid-July sun begins to fill the smelly minivan, you grab your sweet airbrushed helmet and -7 Easton Stealth aluminum bat from the backseat and race towards the dusty fields.

As you begin warming up with your teammates by playing a bit of catch (see: chase balls thrown over your head and down that stupid hill into the woods), you can’t help but begin scouting the other team. “Those kids are huge,” you think to your prepubescent self. Your attention is drawn to one child in particular, due in part to his hulking stature but also to the audible POP! of his partner’s glove. With each subsequent throw and POP! of the glove, you and your entire team begin to quiver in your size-7 Mizuno youth baseball cleats, questioning your own talent, self-worth, and ultimate place in this world. POP! Without doing anything, he’s already gotten in your head.

That child is Giancarlo Stanton.
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Don’t screw this up, Marco Estrada. Just don’t.

That’s not how you’d expect an article about a team that’s clearly trying to contend in 2015 would start, and you’ll understand why it does a little later on. There’s only ever been one article focusing on Estrada on the front page of FanGraphs, and that came back in 2012. This isn’t going to be another. I promise. This is maybe going to be about the fun mark the Blue Jays could potentially set if Estrada never makes a start for them this season, and what that might mean for the playoff dreams. Read the rest of this entry »

Ellis Valentine knows what Josh Hamilton is going through. Valentine battled substance abuse during his playing days, in the 1970s and 1980s, and now works as a certified drug counselor. Hamilton – assuming the reports are true – recently suffered a relapse in his own struggles with addiction.

Valentine has been clean for nearly three decades, and he’s been helping others fight their demons for nearly as long. He’s offered to help the troubled Angels’ slugger, but Hamilton’s handlers have kept him at arm’s length.

“People come to me all the time and ask, ‘Why don’t you work with Josh Hamilton?’ Valentine told me. “I say, ‘I’d love to try — I have tried — but I can’t get close to him.’ I have a lot of compassion for Josh, but the people surrounding him don’t want me around.”

Valentine works out of Dallas and tried reaching out to Hamilton multiple times when the outfielder played for the Texas Rangers. Repeatedly rebuffed, Valentine actually wrote a letter to himself, in 2010, chronicling his failed attempts to lend assistance.

If Hamilton were to allow Valentine the opportunity, he’d receive some tough love. The erstwhile Expo – he represented Montreal in the 1977 All-Star game — was passionate when offering an opinion on what Hamilton has to do. The advice was shaped by personal experience as well as clinical training.

“Somewhere along the line, Josh Hamilton has to grow up,” said Valentine. “I was 31 years old before I filled out my first tax form. I was making hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I had attorneys, my agent – I had all these people to do things for me, so I was allowed to just go out and get high and be in la-la land. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier, I published a post including this graph:

Of all the things that stand out, perhaps nothing stands out quite like the Cubs. Over the last 10 years, they’ve won 55 fewer games than they’ve been projected to win, and while there are some quibbles you can have with blending all the years and all the projection systems, at the end of the day, projections aren’t too dissimilar and they haven’t changed super dramatically over the decade, and no one comes particularly close to matching the Cubs’ level of disappointment. At -55, they’re separated from the next-lowest team by 19 wins.

I don’t think there’s really anything predictive, here. I’d never bet on a given team beating or undershooting its next-year projection. Certainly not based on what it just did. But -55 seems worthy of investigation. What can we find out, about why this might’ve happened? What traits or events might’ve contributed to the Cubs coming off as such a disappointment?

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The Blue Jays have new players up and down their lineup — Russell Martin, Justin Smoak, Josh Donaldson, Michael Saunders, Devon Travis, etc. Dalton Pompey basically qualifies here as well. But one incumbent player may end up being just as, if not more, important than all of the new acquisitions — middle infielder Maicer Izturis.

Signed early in free agency after the 2012 season, Izturis hasn’t really done what the Blue Jays had hoped he would in a Toronto uniform. He was, by WAR, the worst position player in the game in 2013, and then he missed all but 11 games in 2014. Ankle and knee injuries were culprits, though the ankle injury in 2013 may not explain the near-career low walk rate and career-low pitches per plate appearance. Either way, Izturis hasn’t gotten good results for awhile.

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At first, it looked like pitchers that play their home games in extreme parks have extreme home run splits — that pitchers in pitchers’ parks go on the road and give up more home runs than expected. But it turns out, it might just be a Pittsburgh Pirates problem.

Staffs that leave the six most pitcher-friendly parks to go on the road have a 10.5% home run per fly ball rate, we found. But if you remove the Pirates (12%), that number for other six drops to 10.3%, very much close to the 10.1% sample average.

Take a look at the road homer per fly ball rates per team over the last five years. There’s a clear outlier.

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Do you like an origin story? This post was originally going to be about the nature of spring-training optimism. Among players, even, not just fans. It seems like, every single February, when players show up to camp, you get quotes from everywhere about how a given team has a great bunch of guys, and if they play the kind of baseball they’re capable of, there’s no reason the season can’t be magic. I started looking for such quotes for every single team. The way I figured, they had to be out there. And as a matter of fact, I even found one for the Phillies. The same Phillies whose own front office has finally admitted that the team is rebuilding, and contention seems years off.

In case you’ve somehow been in the dark, this year’s Phillies are supposed to be bad. I mean, they aren’t supposed to be bad, but they’re expected to be bad, relative to every single other team. FanGraphs has the Phillies projected for the worst record in baseball. So does Baseball Prospectus. I’m not telling you anything new. Probably going to be a rough year in Philadelphia. But, you know who has opinions? Jonathan Papelbon. Here, he talks to Jim Salisbury about the possibility of being traded.

Toward the bottom of the post:

Papelbon said the Blue Jays would “fit his criteria” because they project as a contending club, but he was quick to add that he believes the Phillies can still be a contender, despite management’s charting a rebuilding course.

“If we come out and play the baseball we’re capable of playing then I plan on being right here and righting the ship here,” he said. […] “My storybook ending here is sneaking into the wild card and getting hot in the playoffs with these Phillies.”

It’s not exactly “we’re getting those rings,” but Papelbon has a certain level of confidence, a level that isn’t shared by Cole Hamels or the people in charge. Papelbon doesn’t see this as an impossible mission. And, wouldn’t you know it — it’s not an impossible mission. Let’s talk about how teams do, relative to how they’re projected to do.

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Trevor Bauer is a lot of things – former first round pick, pupil of Ron Wolforth’s unique coaching style, permanent breakout candidate, and now part of a rotation in Cleveland that many predict will be one of this year’s best. Bauer is a part of the current and future plans for Cleveland, but he’s also a work in progress: a not yet fully realized starter that suffers from real control problems on the mound. The most intriguing thing about Bauer isn’t his upside, however — it’s the fact that he throws a pitch almost totally lost to the modern game: the screwball.

Today, we’re not going to speculate on what Bauer might accomplish this year. Instead, we’re going to focus on the screwball, a pitch thrown by just one or two other pitchers in the majors. It’s an exceedingly rare pitch, and we’re going to look at how he throws it, and see where it fits in his arsenal.

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