Archive for Daily Graphings

A few minutes ago, I noticed that “Padres” was trending on Twitter. Imagine knowing that, and only that, several months ago. If I told you last June that “Padres” would be trending in the middle of February, you probably would’ve assumed one of two things. One, perhaps the San Diego Padres had been officially contracted. Or two, perhaps some citizen investigator had discovered that the Padres still exist. But we know the astonishing reality with which we’re growing accustomed: the Padres are a thing, and with all the moves they’ve made, there’s no question the team wants to win as soon as this season. They don’t want to win just this season, but it stands to reason the Padres would like to make this team as good as they can.

OK, perfect, keep that in mind. The Padres want to be good, right? How could they optimize the team? I’m going to blockquote some of you.

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Yesterday, inspired by a morning chat participant, I drew some parallels between Felix Hernandez‘s changeup and Henderson Alvarez’s changeup. While Felix’s changeup is better than Alvarez’s changeup, in terms of its effectiveness, the actual pitches themselves aren’t too different; the pitchers just have different levels of command of them. I made use of the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards to calculate good comps for Felix’s changeup, and Alvarez’s change came out in the lead by a wide margin. I considered just average velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement, and then I used z-scores to come up with a comparison rating.

I found the exercise fun enough to try again today. Yesterday, I found that Alvarez’s changeup is the best comp for Felix’s changeup, and Felix’s change is a signature pitch. How about some comps for some other signature pitches? That’s what you’re going to find below. Granted, I’ve selected just five signature pitches, and there are a whole lot more of them. That part of this was subjective and kind of random. But, there’s no turning back now. Those pitches examined:

• Clayton Kershaw’s slider
• Adam Wainwright’s cutter
• Sonny Gray’s curveball
• Cole Hamels‘ changeup
• Aroldis Chapman’s fastball

I considered 2014 only, and I compared just righties to righties and lefties to lefties, and starters to starters and relievers to relievers. I set a minimum of 50 pitches thrown, of the given pitch type. Remember that this isn’t necessarily giving you comparisons of pitch quality; just, pitch characteristics. This just looks at averages, so it doesn’t consider variability in velocity or movement, nor does it consider command. In some cases, a good pitch is compared to a good pitch. In other cases, not so much. But the results, at least, are interesting and fun. One last note: for comparison purposes, I combined sliders and cutters, because they’re thrown similarly and sometimes they’re hard to separate. Onward!

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Innovation doesn’t always come on the field. Innovation can invade any part of the sport, really. And innovation doesn’t always mean you are first in your field, even if that sounds wrong. If you define innovation as the introduction of something new, the Giants are constantly innovating upon their own processes.

“You always have to assess your best practices,” admitted Giants Vice President Bobby Evans this week. That includes everything from the training room to the rest room, apparently. Over the last three years, the Giants have spent time improving their facilities so that the fans and players had the best experiences possible. You might not see it easily on the field, and it’s hard to quantify how much these things help — but these changes are probably meaningful.

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This article is one of 13 produced for FanGraphs+. We are running it for free today as an example of the quality of work you will have access to by purchasing our $6 project. Two of the additional 12 articles were also written by Dan Farnsworth, who told you about J.D. Martinez’s pending breakout last winter, so for his breakdowns on Jedd Gyorko and Steven Souza, purchase access to FG+ now.

Jung-Ho Kang is coming to a Pirates game near you, and he better be on your radar as a baseball fan or fantasy manager. As with every foreign import, you have heard scouts and analysts weigh in on Kang, and you will continue to hear more reports as the season approaches. You may have heard his power will not translate to our game, that he may not even be a starter at the highest level of American baseball. I’m here to tell you that these reports starkly underrate Kang’s potential, and now you can cash in as a fantasy owner while everyone else follows the status quo. Kang has an elite swing that will allow his numbers to translate very quickly into Major League success.

Let’s jump right into some images. Here Kang is hitting a fastball out to just right of dead center field for a long home run:

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Play the player-profile game every day this week at 11:15am ET. We’re giving away a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+ to the first reader who guesses correctly the identity of that day’s mystery player. (Limit one copy per customer).

As Eno Sarris announced Monday, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available for purchase with money. As in recent years, we’re celebrating the release of FG+ by way of the player-profile game.

Said game is easy: the author offers the text of an actual player profile from the newest iteration of FG+, being careful to omit any proper names that might reveal the identity of the player in question. The reader, in turn, attempts to identify the player using only the details provided in the profile.

First reader to guess correctly (in the comments section below) gets a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+.

Today’s entry was composed by Patrick Dubuque and actually appeared in last year’s edition of FG+, but is of such considerable merit that it deserves to be revisited.

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Over the weekend, the long saga of James Shields, Pitcher For Hire finally came to a close, with Shields accepting a four year, $75 million contract from the San Diego Padres. $75 million is a pretty nice payday, but it’s a little less than half of the $155 million that Jon Lester received from the Cubs, and nearly one-third of the amount the Nationals will pay Max Scherzer over the life of his new contract. Because of how long it took Shields to sign, and the vast difference in guarantees between what he got and what the top two hurlers on the market got, Shields’ agent — Page Odle — has come under some criticism for how he marketed his player.

Yahoo’s Jeff Passan, for instance, offered up some interesting information about Shields’ early off-season asking price.

Shields found himself mentioned with the other two big-name free agent starters, Max Scherzer and Jon Lester. Consequently, his agent, Page Odle, started asking for terms in similar neighborhoods.
As the Red Sox proffered a six-year, $120 million opening offer to Lester, Odle sought terms in that range, according to multiple clubs involved early in the negotiations. One executive said Odle started discussions with a six-year deal in mind. Another confirmed what the Kansas City Star wrote Monday: He simultaneously was shooting for a five-year, $125 million pact with others.

…

After Lester signed, Shields could have pounced and ramped up negotiations. GMs expected that parry. They held firm, figuring Odle would lessen his demands. That never happened. Shields ended up in San Diego of his own volition, because had he budged earlier, executives believe he would have received plenty more.

There’s a reason no pitcher had signed for more than $50 million in February: No pitcher was foolish enough to wait until February to sign. Most teams, at this juncture, have locked-in budgets that need special dispensations to move. San Diego happens to be in the midst of a complete overhaul, so general manager A.J. Preller walked into negotiations with monetary flexibility – and the knowledge that were he to whiff on Shields, he could trade for Cole Hamels.

A simple move – lowering the expectations on the deal to four years – would have sparked the market. The San Francisco Giants originally were interested at around $80 million over four years. At least a dozen teams would listen at four years, and of those, surely one would pledge $21 million a year times four to separate itself. Which would prompt a jump to $22 million a year, maybe $23 million, and when you add in a club option as a sweetener, that’s a contract that potentially jumps comfortably into the nine-figure range.

$125 million to $75 million is a big drop, and Passan’s information adds context to the question of why Shields sat unsigned for so long. That said, I am left wondering if perhaps what we saw was not so much Shields’ agent overplaying his hand, but instead, the market gently reminding us all that major league teams aren’t valuing pitchers the same way anymore.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

The other night on Twitter, I put out one of those early-February thoughts that can’t really be properly explained in a mere 140 characters: Rick Porcello is going to make more than $100 million next year, and people are going to freak out about that.

Needless to say, I received some interesting replies to that, because the second part’s pretty easy to understand. Porcello’s generally seen as a decent enough pitcher, but one who doesn’t miss bats or prevent runs like his peripherals say that he should, and he’s usually not been among the top three pitchers on his own team. (That he’s been teammates with Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, David Price, Anibal Sanchez, and Doug Fister generally gets left out of that last point.)

James Shields, who has had something like seven seasons better than Porcello’s best, just very recently couldn’t get to $80 million. Porcello’s going to top that? Well, okay then. I guess I need to back this up. Let’s run through this and see if it’s crazy. Spoiler alert: It might be crazy.

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Felix Hernandez’s changeup is one of the best pitches in baseball. How can we actually know this? You could, if you wanted, look at the assigned run values. Those’ll tell you what happened on Felix’s changeups, specifically. But, those run values get complicated, since all pitches are inter-related. One pitch has an effect on another pitch, even if it’s of a different type. Yet there’s a very simple solution to this. How do we know Felix’s changeup is amazing? Felix is amazing, and he uses his changeup a third of the time. So it stands to reason the latter has a lot to do with the former.

A year ago, I was talking to a major leaguer, and when we somehow got to the topic of Henderson Alvarez, the player remarked that Alvarez seemed like he was one little tweak away from becoming a superstar. That much is easy to understand — Alvarez is still very young and he still throws very hard, and all of his pitches have life. It’s easy to see the upside in Alvarez’s repertoire. Maybe he’ll never reach his ceiling, but because of his ability, his ceiling is higher than almost all others.

I was reminded in my chat earlier today that Alvarez has something in common with Felix. Actually, he has a lot of things in common with Felix. That would be another indication of Alvarez’s upside. If you’ve watched Alvarez, and thought to yourself he has an ace’s arsenal of pitches, you haven’t been wrong. He just hasn’t yet made the most of it.

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With James Shields finally signing, the off-season is probably closed for business now. Sure, there are a few veteran relievers still out there, and Rickie Weeks still has to find a new home, but most of the money has been spent and the trades have been made. We’ll see a few more deals in Spring Training, but with pitchers and catchers reporting next week, the Hot Stove is now more of a pile of smoldering coals.

And that means you’re about to be inundated with various lists and rankings of off-season moves. You’re going to read about the best and worst individual moves of the winter — I’ll likely have my own posts on those at the end of the week — as well as the always popular “winners” and “losers” of the off-season. In general, I find the winners/losers recaps to be a little bit formulaic, as they could almost always just be rewritten as “teams that made the most win-now moves” and “team that made the fewest transactions”.

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“I was always pitching to a smaller strike zone,” Ryan Vogelsong said of his time in Nippon Professional Baseball. “That’s just the way it is, it’s the unwritten rule of baseball there, the foreigner’s strike zone is going to be smaller.”

Vogelsong is not alone — other returnees from Japan report unfair treatment from umpires there. A first look at the numbers seems to hint at the possibility that the strike zone is called differently for Japanese and foreign players. But closer inspection reveals that this could also come from a clash of cultures — baseball cultures.

Last Friday, Giants Ryan Vogelsong and Casey McGehee — while highly appreciative of their time in Japan and the things they learned while playing there — both independently referenced preferential treatment for homegrown stars in Nippon Professional Baseball.

From the other side of the plate, McGehee said that “you end up striking out looking a lot because there were a lot of times that if the catcher caught it, you were sitting down.” Using the Japanese word for foreigner, McGehee said the matchup was important: “Your best case scenario was when you had a gaijin pitching and a gaijin hitting.”

Jason Coskrey covers baseball for the Japan Times and has heard foreign players say this sort of thing before. He reached out to Jeremy Powell, who was with the Expos for two years and pitched in both NPB’s Central and Pacific Leagues from 2001-2008. While Powell felt that umpires were “focused on simply doing their best to do a good job,” it was a bit different when it came to big calls — “in crucial counts that really had an impact on how the inning may end up there were times that the call would favor the native player — it came with the territory (literally), it’s part of the game and I had to move on, albeit it was never easy.”

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.