Much of modern sabermetric thought regarding pitcher evaluation has been based upon the theory that most types of contact are created somewhat equally. High and low BABIPs allowed are usually attributed to good and bad luck, and FIP, which is directly based upon BABIP, is oft cited as the go-to individual pitching statistic. Well, not all contact is created equal. This week, we’re using a fairly basic method of evaluating contact management ability, and looking at the leading contact managers in both leagues. As it turns out, there’s a head-to-head battle for supremacy in both the AL and NL. Read the rest of this entry »

In an unexpected turn of events, the Royals are fighting with the Tigers to try to win the AL Central, which hasn’t escaped your attention. The Tigers have been hurt by Justin Verlander being replaced by Chris Volstad, and by Joe Nathan being also replaced by Chris Volstad. The Royals, meanwhile, have been helped by an overall clutch team performance and an amazing defensive outfield. At this point, the division is almost a toss-up, where as recently as a few weeks ago it looked like the Tigers would advance without breaking a sweat.

Looking up at both of those teams, not quite out of the race but not quite in the middle of it, are the Indians. Though the Indians haven’t been markedly worse than the Royals, they have, in several ways, been the anti-Royals. The Royals have been clutch, and the Indians haven’t. The Royals have outplayed their BaseRuns, and the Indians haven’t. The Royals haven’t hit well, and the Indians have. The Royals haven’t had a strong rotation, and the Indians have. And then you get to the fielding. There is no greater difference between the two teams than there is in the field, where the Royals have been great and where the Indians have been less than that.

Read the rest of this entry »

So we know by now that Garrett Richards has blossomed into an ace. He always had it in him, at least based on his fastball velocity and movement, and in this particular season he’s helped to pick up a lot of the slack within an Angels rotation that carried a bunch of question marks. Richards is the premier arm on the staff, and a part of his breakout has had to do with his dramatic increase in strikeout rate. From last year to this year, Richards has increased his strikeouts by half, which, well, think about that.

The other part of his breakout has had to do with his limiting quality contact. Tony just wrote about this Wednesday, linking Richards with Felix Hernandez, and that’s saying something considering Felix is having one of the better seasons ever. Richards has started 24 baseball games, and he’s allowed just five home runs. He’s yielded a .256 slugging percentage that is actually lower than his opponents’ on-base percentage. You don’t need to dig too deep to understand that batters haven’t been hitting the ball hard against Garrett Richards through four and a half months. But, what’s going on here? How does a pitcher allow just a .063 ISO?

Read the rest of this entry »

You’re familiar with win/loss standings. I’m pretty comfortable with this assumption. You’re likely also growing familiar with BaseRuns win/loss standings. It’s something we’ve cited pretty often since we began to offer the data, and the idea behind BaseRuns is that it strips away sequencing. Actual standings show you performance plus variation. BaseRuns standings show you performance. It’s not quite that simple, but that’s the outline, so it’s interesting to compare how teams have done to how BaseRuns thinks teams have done.

Take the American League Central, right now. The Royals are leading! The Royals are leading the Tigers, by half of a game! Yet, BaseRuns preserves the Tigers’ winning percentage, but drops the Royals’ winning percentage from .542 to .480. BaseRuns doesn’t think the Royals are as good as the Tigers at all. So why are the Royals presently where they are? They’ve been clutch. Sequencing has been a strength of the Royals, and of course, sequencing can make an enormous difference if you under- or over-perform in high-leverage situations. The Royals have earned their current record by doing well when it’s mattered the most.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are six weeks left in the 2014 regular season, and if the season ended today, we’d have some fairly surprising playoff teams. The Brewers are in first place in the NL Central, the Orioles have a huge lead in the AL East, and the Mariners are tied with the Tigers for the second Wild Card spot. You probably didn’t predict any of those outcomes, and I know I certainly didn’t. This is part of what is great about baseball, and especially in the current age of parity, the playoff teams are no longer as predetermined as they once seemed.

Results like these often convince people that preseason forecasts are basically useless. As you’ve probably been told repeatedly by various announcers and baseball scribes, the game is played on the field, not on a spreadsheet. However, I thought it would be instructive to look back at the forecasted performance from the beginning of the season and see how well they managed to evaluate expected performance.

To do this, however, we’re not going to compare the projected standings to the actual standings, because a team’s record is essentially a function of two things: how many hits, walks, and other positive events a team creates relative to how many they give up, and the timing of when those events occur. The first one is what projection systems specialize in forecasting, but they really have no way of knowing which teams will tend to bunch their hits together, or distribute their runs in such a way as to win a bunch of close contests.

The timing aspects of win-loss record is basically random, and since there’s no real way to project it in advance, we don’t really want to judge how well a projection did based on results that are influenced by randomness. Instead, we’re better off looking at just the quantity and value of the types of baserunners a team achieved over and above what they gave up, and evaluate the preseason forecasts based on how well they match up with what a team’s expected record would be without the timing effects that can skew runs and wins. After all, that is really what the forecasts are trying to measure.

At FanGraphs, we publish the seasonal data from a model called BaseRuns, which takes all of the events a team creates and allows and turns them into an expected runs scored and runs allowed total. Based on those numbers, we can come up with an expected winning percentage that doesn’t factor the timing of events into the results, and so that’s what we’ll use to measure the team forecasts.

Here are the top five teams that have outperformed their preseason expected winning percentages.

Read the rest at Just a Bit Outside.

Much of modern sabermetric thought regarding pitcher evaluation has been based upon the theory that most types of contact are created somewhat equally. High and low BABIPs allowed are usually attributed to good and bad luck, and FIP, which is directly based upon BABIP, is oft cited as the go-to individual pitching statistic. Well, not all contact is created equal. This week, we’re going to use a fairly basic method of evaluating contact management ability, and look at the leading contact managers in both leagues. As it turns out, there’s a head-to-head battle for supremacy in both the AL and NL. Read the rest of this entry »

Let us, for a moment, imagine a wacky, nonsensical alternate reality MLB. In this alternate reality MLB, players do not agree upon a salary before the season begins. Rather, they are compensated for their yearly production. Let’s say that production is measured by WAR. The generally accepted market value of a win is approximately $6 million/WAR.

During Shin-Soo Choo’s prime in Cleveland from 2008-10, he was a 5-win player. Last year, for Cincinnati, he was a 5-win player. At Choo’s best, and his most recent prior to signing a big free agent contract this offseason, he would have earned $30M per season for his production. That’s a high number! That’s a lot of production.

In this year’s wacky, nonsensical alternate reality MLB, Choo would still be waiting to earn his first dollar. By the end of the season, he’d be lucky to scrape together a few million. As of about a week ago, he would have actually owed the Texas Rangers organization a million or two.
Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

At the close of business on July 20, the Braves and Nationals were exactly where they’d been for six of the previous seven days and for most of the season: tied. The two teams had been no further apart than 3.5 games all season long, continuing the two-headed competition that the NL East has been for the last several seasons since the Phillies stopped being competitive. (Your day will come, Mets and Marlins. Probably.)

At the time, our playoff odds still favored the Nationals to take the division simply because the projections considered them to be the better team, but it was easy to believe that the race was still a toss-up. After all, the Nationals were the big favorites in 2013, and they finished 10 games behind. They were the big favorites in 2014, and they weren’t doing all that much to back it up. I wondered last winter if we were overrating the Nationals coming into this year, and they certainly making it seem that way.

Just over three weeks later, the Nationals are holding a comfortable five-game lead in the NL East. Only one team in baseball has a higher likelihood of winning the division in our current playoff odds. The Nationals must have finally turned it on, right? Actually, no. They’re just 11-10 in the 21 games since. Ryan Zimmerman suffered another serious injury. Bryce Harper has been mediocre. Asdrubal Cabrera was their big trade deadline pickup. They haven’t suddenly woken up.

Instead, the Braves have gone on to drop 15 of their next 21. No team in baseball has won fewer games over that stretch. After losing all eight games on a west coast road trip, they’ve now lost three of their last four. They’re closer to the third-place Marlins than to the first-place Nationals. While the baseball world is busy watching what’s happening in Kansas City and Detroit, Atlanta is doing their best to hand this race to Washington. Read the rest of this entry »

The player with baseball’s third-best wOBA started on Tuesday, and the first time he came up, he drilled a low-away curveball into center for a single. The next time, behind 0-and-2, he fought off an inside fastball and lifted another single into center. The third time, he yanked a low slider down the left-field line for extra bases. I’m taking a risk by writing this post before the game is fully over, so perhaps there’ll be a fourth time, and maybe that’ll go well and maybe it won’t. No matter the outcome, it’s hardly the most important data point.

The most important data point is this: Right now, the best hitter in baseball has been either Mike Trout or Troy Tulowitzki. To round out the top five, you’ve got a selection, including names like Andrew McCutchen, Edwin Encarnacion, and Devin Mesoraco. Four of these players named are known to be amazing. Mesoraco’s been amazing; he’s just not known for it yet.

Read the rest of this entry »