Archive for Daily Graphings

This is all the excuse I need:

#Rockies sign SS Omar Quintanilla, a utility INF for 2005-09 teams, and re-sign veteran RH reliever Rafael Betancourt

— Matt Eddy (@MattEddyBA) January 30, 2015

I’ve developed a very minor obsession with Rafael Betancourt. If you’ve paid close attention over the years, you might’ve noticed, but I wouldn’t blame you for not paying close attention whenever I write about Rafael Betancourt. But here I am doing it again, because I don’t think I’ve talked about this for more than two years, and each time I do it, I have a little more data. Do you like fun facts? Betancourt comes with a couple awesome fun facts. They’re almost totally irrelevant, in the grand scheme of things, but then, what isn’t?

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As I write this on the afternoon of February 1, the Diamondbacks catching depth chart looks like this:

#31 Diamondbacks

That’s a position for a major league baseball team! A not particularly good or even interesting team, but a major league team nonetheless. Look at it. Bask in it. If the concept of “replacement level” needed a human face, well, here’s a bunch of them. With barely more than two weeks before pitchers report to begin throwing to those catchers, that’s what the Diamondbacks look like they’re going to have. It’s been nearly two months since Miguel Montero was dealt to the Cubs, and everyone assumed that another move would be coming, some way to ensure that the team would have at least a single dependable catcher to make it through the season.

Despite some rumors, nothing’s happened. Dioner Navarro is still a Blue Jay, despite Russell Martin. Welington Castillo, seemingly made redundant by Montero and David Ross joining the Cubs, is still in Chicago, and if a deal was going to be there, it seems like it would have been there within the Montero deal. Carlos Corporan is a Ranger. Geovany Soto went to the White Sox. A ton of other catchers — Ryan Hanigan, Rene Rivera, Yasmani Grandal, Derek Norris, Hank Conger, etc. — found themselves on the move. The top remaining free agent catcher is probably 35-year-old Gerald Laird, which is to say, there’s no longer any remaining free agent catchers.Update: Of course they did.

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Last week, people talked a lot about shifts. People talked about shifts because baseball’s new commissioner talked about shifts, and baseball’s new commissioner talked about shifts because shifts are up and runs are down. Now, it’s been mostly demonstrated that shifts are far from the main reason why run scoring is on the decline, but we all can at least agree that shift usage has skyrocketed. Last year there were almost six times as many shifts employed as there were in 2011. That’s a huge increase in not very much time. Seeing arrangements like this is becoming more common, and these days it’s a surprise when a pull-hitting slugger doesn’t face an adjusted infield.

With shifts on the rise as a defensive strategy, we’ve tried to figure out ways to counter the strategy with a different one at the plate. Ben Lindbergh wrote an excellent recurring column at Baseball Prospectus, detailing bunts against the shift. That’s the obvious bit — it seems almost too easy to get a free single when the third baseman is hugging second. Somewhat famously, bunts against the shift remain unusual. But there’s also the matter of hitting the other way. If a batter starts to spray the ball more, it could effectively undo the shift, and some players have talked about emphasizing an all-fields approach. So, out of curiosity, have we seen any progress? Have hitters demonstrated a better ability to go the other way?

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If you’re a Rays fan, you want Mark Sappington to make the team this year. If you’re a member of the Tampa Bay media, you really want Mark Sappington to make the team. Trust me on this one.

A 24-year-old right-hander from Peculiar, Missouri (yep), Sappington is 6-foot-5, throws 100 mph, and supplies quips at a mile a minute. Think Justin Masterson, smiling, sans a sinker.

The Rays acquired the happy-go-lucky hurler from the Angels in November – in the middle of the Arizona Fall League season – for Cesar Ramos. Going strictly by the numbers, it was a curious deal. A fifth-round pick in 2012 out of Rockhurst University, Sappington was 4-11, 6.04 this year between high-A Inland Empire and Double-A Arkansas.

I asked Sappington why the Rays were interested.

“Shoot, you got me,” responded the big righty. “I did kind of find my groove after moving into the bullpen, where I was able to harness all of my energy into one inning. I get pretty amped up on the mound. I get in the zone. I get in the Z.”

His mid-season move to the pen resulted in more mid-90s velocity readings. There were a few 98s and 99s, and Sappington told me he hit 100 in the AFL. Command is his biggest issue. He said it’s a matter of “getting through the baseball,” and when his timing is down he can throw the ball where he wants to. When it’s not, “That’s when there’s a little craziness.”

Mike Foltynewicz told me this summer that his control improves when he dials down from 100 to 94-95. Mentioning that to Sappington elicited admiration. Read the rest of this entry »

Last time, I looked at which MLB teams do and don’t pursue players born in the five most prolific non-draft-eligible countries (the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, and Japan). Part of the goal there was to identify which of the 30 MLB organizations are the most aggressive and/or progressive in terms of finding the best talent they possibly can o’er the entire globe.

Of course, looking at how teams approach well-established springs of baseball talent like the Dominican is hardly the only way to identify whether or not a team is looking for new and novel opportunities outside of the Nifty Fifty. In the past twenty or so years, there are five other countries who — while they have not produced a similar total number of MLB players as the aforementioned Established Five — are producing more and more MLB-caliber players as time goes on: Australia, Colombia, Curacao, South Korea, and Taiwan. Teams who sign the most players from these locales are, at the very least, in admirable pursuit of new and unexpected sources of that rare gem: an MLB-caliber player.

This time I will only be tallying which team signed which player as an international free agents — I will not be tallying other MLB teams that each player eventually played for during their careers stateside. Players who were born in these countries but who were eventually drafted in the rookie draft are excluded from the count. I used a lot of help from Baseball Reference and Baseball Almanac. Here we go!

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At the Cincinnati Enquirer, C. Trent Rosencrans notes that, after Ichiro Suzuki plays his first game in a Miami Marlins uniform, the Reds will be the only of the 30 MLB teams to never employ a player born in Japan at the major-league level. (Tip of the hat to MLBTradeRumors.)

Here is a quote that Rosencrans shares from Reds General Manager Walt Jocketty:

We do have some people who do cross-checking, we don’t have a scout in Japan. It’s too costly.

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Yesterday, Dave put forward a proposal about how Major League Baseball could possibly improve its pace of play and run scoring in one fell swoop: limit the number of pitchers allowed per game to four. He couched it by saying that it was an admittedly crazy idea. But after compiling a grid of how many pitchers are used per game, I’m not so sure that it is.

What I wanted to see is a grid of how each team used its pitchers. How many games with two pitchers, three pitchers, etc. Thankfully, Baseball-Reference’s pitching game logs are very accommodating in this regard. In order to get a representative sample, I scrubbed out extra inning games, as well as games that were shortened for some reason (most likely rain). That leaves just the games where the pitchers threw eight to nine innings. Now, there’s certainly a chance that there was some weird game that was stopped for rain after eight innings, but barring that, this should be a sample of all the “regulation” games from last season. No team had fewer than 141 of these games, and no team had more than 154. Most of the games removed were extra-inning games, there were just a handful of shortened games.

Enough talk, let’s get to the grid:

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Understand that I’m not a pitching coach. I’ve never played one on TV, and if I were asked to serve as one for an actual team, I’d be wildly out of my element. Pitching is complicated, and pitchers in the major leagues are impossibly good, and pitchers in the major leagues also have reasons for doing what they do however they do it. I don’t know if what follows is good advice for Kevin Gausman and James Paxton, or garbage. It’s just, there’s at least enough here that we can have a conversation.

Thursday, I wrote about the Rays and collecting and encouraging high fastballs. I’m interested in this high-fastball thing — it’s an intuitively sensible way to attack hitters who are increasingly prepared to hit down low. The Rays have talked about this idea. The Astros have talked about this idea. Brandon McCarthy has talked about this idea, during an interview for the Hardball Times Annual. It’s a trend, seemingly, to counter a different trend. But it’s worth noting, not just any fastball should be thrown high. You need to have some command, and you need to be able to generate the right kind of spin. You want to have a fastball — a four-seamer — with a high PITCHf/x vertical-movement reading. That’s not the way pitchers themselves think about it, but that’s how we can understand it.

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ERA, probably the single most cited reference for evaluating the performance of a pitcher, comes with a lot of problems. Neil does a good job outlining why in this FanGraphs Library entry. Over the last decade, plenty of research has cast a light on the variables within ERA that often have very little to do with the pitcher himself.

But what is the best way to use fielding-independent stats to estimate ERA? FIP is probably the most popular metric of this ilk, using only strikeouts, walks, hit batters, and home runs to create a linear equation that can be scaled to look like an expected ERA. Then there’s xFIP, which is based off the idea that pitchers have very little control over their HR/FB rate; to account for this, it estimates the amount of home runs that a pitcher should have allowed by multiplying their fly balls allowed by the league average HR/FB rate.

For many people, however, these are too simple. FIP more or less ignores all balls in play completely; xFIP treats all fly balls equally. Neither one correctly accounts for the effects that any ball in play can have; we know that the wOBA on line drives is much higher than the wOBA on pop ups, but we don’t see that reflected in many ERA estimators. The estimators we use also are fully linear, and may break down at the extreme ends; FIP tells us that a pitcher who strikes out every batter should have an ERA around -5.70, which is, well you know, not going to happen.

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Starling Marte was already one of the kings of hidden value. Metrics like Wins Above Replacement (WAR) have loved him, despite his average power, and despite his ugly ratios of strikeouts to walks. One contributing factor has been that he’s played half the time in an extremely pitcher-friendly ballpark, but this goes well beyond that. Marte has done a little bit of everything.

Forcing mistakes? Last season, Marte reached base 14 times on defensive errors. No one else in baseball exceeded 12. It’s an open question as to whether forcing errors is any kind of sustainable skill, but it makes sense that Marte puts pressure on the defense with his speed. Right there, you’ve got 14 outs that turned into non-outs. That’s one example of hidden value.

And while Marte has drawn just 66 walks as a big-leaguer, he’s also reached base another 44 times on hit-by-pitches. No one wants to be hit by a pitch, and Marte has been hurt by getting drilled, but reaching base is valuable, and Marte has this additional means. Over the last two years, Marte is the league leader.

Then there’s the matter of baserunning. Marte’s been caught stealing a whole bunch of times, but he’s also been successful a whole bunch of other times, and baserunning is about more than just stealing anyhow. It’s also about awareness, about being able to take extra bases when opportunities present themselves, and overall, the last two years, Marte has been worth about 13 runs more than average with his legs. That ranks him sixth, between Elvis Andrus and Mike Trout.

Of course, there’s also the defense. Marte is a corner outfielder who’s good enough to be a center fielder. By one metric — UZR — Marte has been worth almost 20 runs more than the average left fielder. By Defensive Runs Saved, he comes in at double that. Nobody questions that Marte is an outstanding defender, covering a lot of ground in what’s a relatively expansive section of the PNC outfield.

With everything he’s done, Marte has demonstrated that he’s a quality player, and a definite building block. He’s been one of the better players in the National League, and he’s been a huge reason behind the Pirates’ return to relevance. All that’s been missing have been a few developments within the box. Except, perhaps, those developments might’ve already taken place.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.