Archive for Daily Graphings

You may have heard that football is in the midst of a bit of a concussion crisis. Not only is the National Football League facing a number of concussion-related lawsuits, but suits have been filed at the collegiate, high school, and Pop Warner levels as well. Meanwhile, both professional hockey and soccer are also facing their own concussion litigation.

Like football, hockey, and soccer, baseball is also – at times – a contact sport, and baseball players occasionally suffer concussions. In 2013, for instance, former outfielder Ryan Freel became the first professional baseball player to be diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – the brain disease often associated with professional football players – following a career during which he reportedly suffered nine or ten concussions.

So it is reasonable to ask whether Major League Baseball could be the next league to face a concussion-related lawsuit, and if so, how such a case would compare to those in the other sports?

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Winter ball in Puerto Rico wrapped up at the end of January, with Javier Baez attempting to improve his plate discipline problems after a short stint in the majors at the end of 2014. That stint, as most of us are aware, featured him striking out 41% of the time he came to the plate. Unfortunately, Baez didn’t seem to improve that aspect of his game very much while playing for the Cangrejeros de Santurce, as he went 11-43 with five walks and 21 strikeouts during the regular winter season. For those without a calculator handy, that’s a 44% strikeout rate. His walk rate improved to 10% (6.6% in 2014 MLB), so we can say there was some positive news to be claimed from his time there.

We have barely enough plate appearances for Baez from the winter league to know whether these rate statistics actually hold water, and it certainly doesn’t bode well that Baez struck out so often in Puerto Rico against the quasi-equivalent of AAA pitching talent. He managed to strike out less often in the winter league playoff games, going 13-64 with four walks and 18 strikeouts – a 26% strikeout rate that again is from a small sample size, and still not great, but an improvement. The Cubs decided to pull the plug on him in winter ball after the playoffs, preventing him from playing in the Caribbean Series after Santurce won the Puerto Rican Championship. If we combine the regular winter season and playoffs, we get this line for Baez:

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It’s prospect season. Over at FanGraphs, we released our Top 200 Prospects list yesterday; last week, Rob wrote about flipping through the recently released Prospect Handbook from Baseball America. It seems like everyone is currently in the process of ranking and grading minor leaguers, speculating about which ones are going to become the stars of tomorrow.

But as Rob pointed out last week, most of the guys we’re so excited about now are never going to pan out. Quoting his piece, which in turn quotes BA’s Handbook.

“In the 2011 Prospect Handbook, we detailed the depth of the Royals’ top-ranked farm system, which we also featured on the cover of the March 2011 issue of Baseball America magazine. No team had ever placed nine players in Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects before, and group – both as big leaguers and through trades – helped form the core of the Royals’ 2014 American League pennant winners.

Turning a losing franchise into a winner – that’s why prospects matter.”

Here are those nine guys who made the Top 100 list: Eric Hosmer, Wil Myers, Mike Moustakas, John Lamb, Mike Montgomery, Christian Colon, Danny Duffy, Chris Dwyer, Aaron Crow.

I will pardon you for being underwhelmed.

Rob is right; the Royals had one of the most celebrated farm systems of all time, and a majority of their prospects haven’t done jack squat in the big leagues. Some of the guys who weren’t as highly heralded have become stars, and the Royals are absolutely an example of why prospect development can help turn a franchise around, but even in boasting of a clear success story, there are examples of failure everywhere.

In fact, according to most of the research done on prospect rankings, the failure rate for players ranked within Baseball America’s Top 100 approaches 70%. Even selecting the cream of the crop, theoretically the guys we should have the best information on, seven in ten fail to become significant big league contributors.

This seems like a lousy success rate, and it’s one of the reasons why there is significant pushback against the rising valuations teams are putting on minor league players with no big league track record. For example, the Phillies have been frustrated by the market’s unwillingness to surrender the kinds of talent they believe Cole Hamels is worth, and likely the kind of return he would have brought even a few years ago. The relative values teams are placing on on big league stars and minor league prospects has shifted towards the young kids, even as most of them continue to fail.

Even JABO’s own Ken Rosenthal has argued strongly that prospects are currently being overvalued in trade negotiations, and that teams should not be so afraid to part with their best young talents. That 70% failure rate supports these suggestions; why be so attached to an asset that is more likely than not going to lose all of its value?

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

You know the difference between control and command? Mariano Rivera is why the difference exists. Some pitchers are good at throwing strikes; Mariano Rivera was good at throwing Rivera strikes, which were simply strikes where Rivera wanted them to be. They looked a lot like any other strike, and pitch to pitch you wouldn’t really notice a difference, but over time, pitches pile up, and locations really matter. No one has located quite like Rivera, and you can guess the effects. Or you don’t have to, since Rivera’s career is complete and we have a full statistical record, but anyway. Because Rivera could locate, he could make certain numbers work in his favor.

Yeah, he struck guys out. Yeah, he didn’t walk guys much. Those are the basics. But Rivera was also skilled at allowing weaker contact than your average other guy. One of the reasons we’re usually skeptical of BABIP-suppressing skill is that most pitchers just aren’t good at hitting the same spots over and over. Rivera was one of the exceptions. He limited the singles, and he limited the non-singles.

Let’s take a look at something. PITCHf/x captured only the last few years of Rivera’s career, but Rivera was still outstanding when the cameras were installed, so we have a good amount of data. Let’s consider balls in play that Rivera allowed on pitches that were out of the strike zone. (Thank you, Baseball Savant.) You know what those balls in play are? They’re worse balls in play. Worse, relative to pitches over the plate.

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Two bits of news spread almost simultaneously Monday night: Bruce Chen signed somewhere for a minor-league contract, and Barry Zito had signed somewhere else for, also, a minor-league contract. This is the season of minor-league contracts, as the pool of available free agents has been reduced to a puddle on an otherwise dry concrete foundation. But of those names still out there, Chris Young has a certain intrigue. If Chen and Zito can find opportunities, it stands to reason Young should find one as well. Right?

Certainly, his agent has been called. Certainly, there have been feelers. And it’s not a complete mystery why Young remains unsigned. This is Chris Young, to the naked eye:

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We often hear the Cardinals being described as one of the best organizations in baseball for their ability to consistently put a winning product on the field, and that’s a reputation that they’ve earned though consistent excellence. It never seems that the Tigers get talked about in quite the same way, but perhaps that’s unfair. In the nine seasons since and including 2006, when the two met in the World Series, the Tigers have won 790 games. The Cardinals have won 789. The Tigers have made five playoff trips and suffered one losing season; the Cardinals have made six playoff trips and suffered one losing season.

If there’s a difference, maybe it’s that the Cardinals have two rings in that span while the Tigers haven’t yet made it to the top, or maybe we just perceive them differently because the Tigers were absolutely dreadful for most of the two decades preceding their recent run. But the real difference is that the Cardinals seem to continually reinforce themselves from a deep and talented farm system, while the Tigers have continually made win-now moves to add more talent around their iconic duo of Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander.

Needless to say, that’s a considerable difference in team-building philosophies, and it’s not a cycle that can last forever. We’re already seeing cracks in the core due to injuries and aging, and we haven’t seen a lot of coming from within to help support that. That’s not to say the Tigers are done, of course; they’ve won four division titles in a row, and they may very well win a fifth in 2015, even though their offseason was more than a little uneven (more on that in a minute). But more and more you start to wonder how long the window remains open, and while that’s not an unfair question — I asked this same question back in late 2013, after the Tigers lost to the Red Sox in the ALCS — what I want to know is, what happens here when the window closes? Read the rest of this entry »

There in the Giants clubhouse, behind the stars you’ve heard everything about, are two rare players. They’ve made a circuit that very few players have made before. After surviving the gauntlet, they took some time to pass on what they learned with their travels East.

New Giants’ third baseman Casey McGehee was pretty sure his Major League Baseball career was over when he packed his bags for Sendai in Japan. “Going over there, that was one of the toughest parts, I knew the chances of coming back weren’t great,” the player said before FanFest last week.

But both McGehee and Ryan Vogelsong made it back, and to the same team no less. Of the 167 foreigners that have played in Nippon Professional Baseball since 1998, Brian Cartwright found that only 11 position players have managed more than 100 plate appearances back in America, and only Julio Franco and McGehee managed as much as 300 in one season. Only nine pitchers pitched for more than one season after returning from Japan.

Or: nobody has come back from Japan since 1998 and become a full-time starter like McGehee, and only Eric Stults, Colby Lewis, and Ryan Vogelsong have returned and managed more than 100 innings twice in the big leagues.

Though the game itself isn’t very different there — they bunt a little more, swing a little more, and play for one run more often — it could be that the trip over has that sense of finality to it that you hear from McGehee. You don’t usually come back and become an important part of a good team.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

This morning, Kiley McDaniel released the FanGraphs Top 200 Prospects list, providing a remarkable source of information. We’re obviously biased, but Kiley’s doing great work with the prospect information provided here on the site. One of my favorite things he’s doing is working to break down the barriers of the ordinal ranked list, providing Future Value grades that allow for more reasonable tiers of prospects, so that less time is spent arguing over whether a particular player should be #23 or #28 on a particular list.

So, I wanted to see if I could come up with a piece that would complement the information he’s presenting, using the value of having additional information beyond just ordinal ranking. To that end, I took latest prospect valuation estimates from Kevin Creagh and Steve DiMiceli, and attempted to convert their tiered valuation estimations into numbers based on the Future Value calculations Kiley attached to each prospect on his list.

As I noted when we discussed the prospect valuation work a few months ago, the data is fascinating, but also slightly problematic for this purpose. For instance, here’s the table of values for prospect tiers according to Creagh and DiMiceli.

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The FIP statistic was created because of the inherent shortcomings of ERA; so much that was reflected in the traditional pitchers’ statistic was totally out of their control, and the new metric credited and debited hurlers for that which they did. As it turns out, FIP isn’t perfect either, as not all types of batted-ball contract are created equal. Still, FIP is preferable to ERA in just about every way imaginable, and is a much better anchor upon which to base pitcher evaluations. In any given year, however, there are pitchers who are much better (or worse) than both their ERA and FIP, once you adjust for quality of batted ball contact allowed. Today, let’s look at the two ERA title-qualifying AL starters who were most significantly better than both their ERA and FIP in 2014; Drew Hutchison and Jake Odorizzi. Read the rest of this entry »

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to understand and appreciate the potential impact of pitching coaches. I mean, I always had some suspicions, and I was one of those people really interested in Rick Peterson back in the day, but, in March of 2006, the Mariners traded Matt Thornton to the White Sox for Joe Borchard. You have to understand what Matt Thornton was at the time — though he had a big arm, he’d been infuriating with Seattle, incapable of throwing consecutive strikes. I remember being overjoyed about his departure; he’d walked one of every six batters, proving himself completely and utterly unreliable. A big arm without any control? There are a million of those. They just about never figure it out.

Instantly, Thornton figured it out. Because Don Cooper figured it out. Cooper had figured it out a couple years earlier.

 The left-hander always possessed a gifted arm, with a fastball in the mid 90s, but also has battled control issues. Thornton mentioned that Cooper noticed the flaw two years ago, while watching game film on him, at a time when the White Sox were interested in acquiring the one-time first-round draft pick from Seattle.

“I kidded him by saying, ‘You could have sent me a little note or something,'” said Thornton with a laugh. “It may have been a little different for me.”

Thornton, as a Mariner, threw 59% strikes. His first year with the White Sox, he threw 67% strikes. He’s maintained the same rate ever since, and though Thornton’s career is just about up, he’s 38 years old, and for a time he was a premier lefty reliever. He’s totaled more than $20 million in career salary. If it weren’t for Don Cooper, who knows what would’ve happened with Thornton’s professional path? Would he still be set for life? Would he be a realtor?

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