Archive for Daily Graphings

A couple weeks ago, the Rays signed Everett Teaford to a minor-league contract. Even if you noticed it, you forgot it, because people tend to forget all these minor-league acquisitions, and if you remember Teaford for anything, it’s not for being good. After being not good for the Royals, Teaford spent last year in Korea, where he had a league-average ERA. I don’t know if he changed something; I don’t know if the Rays saw something. But I know I can look at Teaford’s PITCHf/x page on Brooks Baseball, and he’s flashed something of a live heater. The vertical-movement column shows a pitch’s movement relative to a pitch thrown with no spin. The league-average four-seamer comes in just shy of 9 inches. Teaford’s been a little north of 10. That’s where you start talking about rise.

And when you talk about rising fastballs, you’re talking about something of great interest to Tampa Bay. They don’t actually rise, of course — they just don’t sink as much as normal fastballs. And while Teaford might not throw a single pitch for the Rays in the regular season, his fastball, at least, looks like it could fit in. The Rays have something going on, and while they’re not the only team with the idea, they seem like the most aggressive in the implementation.

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Earlier in the week, Rob Manfred laid out some ideas that the sport could consider to both increase run scoring and improve the pace of play. While those seem like competing priorities, there is some evidence that both can be obtained simultaneously, though it seems unlikely that either restricting the shift or implementing a pitch clock would move the game in both directions. Instead, if MLB wants to make changes that serve both interests, they should probably pick a different approach.

If there’s been one significant change to the game over the last 30 years that has both extended the amount of standing-around-doing-nothing time during games and tipped the balance in favor of run prevention, it has been the expansion of the modern-day bullpen. Jonah Keri and Neil Paine covered this well in a piece at FiveThirtyEight last August, and because I like the graph they used in their piece, I’m going to steal it and embed it below.

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Periodically over the next few weeks, I’m going to take an early look at the six divisions in a slightly unorthodox manner. Utilizing batted ball data, we’ll go back over the 2014 season and attempt to calculate each club’s true talent level. Making adjustments for teams’ offensive and defensive K and BB rates and team defense, we’ll calculate each team’s true talent 2014 won-lost record. Then, we’ll take a look at the current Steamer projections for 2015, evaluate key player comings and goings, and determine whether clubs are constructed to be able to handle the inevitable pitfalls along the way that could render such projections irrelevant. The second installment of this series features the NL Central. Read the rest of this entry »

Have I mentioned lately how helpful the chats can be when it comes to finding things to write about? You guys don’t know how valuable you are. Dozens upon dozens of questions, if not hundreds upon hundreds, and out of those questions, longer posts can occasionally germinate. This is one of them! Because I’ve noticed a recurring kind of question about Drew Hutchison, and how much he might be capable of in 2015.

Pulling an example, from earlier January:

Comment From BJ Birdie
Drew Hutchison had a 26% k rate and 7% walk rate in second half of 2014 after changing his slider (slower, more vertical movement), what do you think his chances of a major break out are in 2015?

Dave Cameron: I think the research has shown that trying to use second half performance to predict future breakouts is a fool’s errand.

Dave’s right, of course. The smart thing to do is to always bet against a breakout, as foretold by an encouraging second half. But that’s also boring, and one figures encouraging second halves can sometimes mean something for the season to come. We’re all just here to analyze, right? So, let’s do some analysis. What on earth was the deal with Drew Hutchison’s slider?

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By this point you might feel like you know enough about the Carlos Carrasco story. Carrasco is coming off what looks like a breakthrough season. It was also his age-27 season, and previously, he was mostly regarded as a bust. He first showed up in the Baseball America top-100 before 2007, when the No. 1 prospect on the list was Daisuke Matsuzaka. Carrasco was one of the headliners of the Phillies’ trade for Cliff Lee. That was before Lee got traded to the Mariners for what’s turned out to be busts. And that was before Lee got traded to the Rangers for whats’ turned out to be busts. Carrasco had a delayed emergence, is the point. He’s why it’s hard to ever give up entirely on a former top prospect.

Yet it’s worth remembering that 2014 wasn’t a total victory for Carrasco from start to finish. It was only down the stretch that he seemed to put all his pieces together in the right places, and before his final stint in the rotation, he looked like just a pretty good reliever. There was something that clicked upon Carrasco’s final return to starting, and it seems to me it bodes well for his future in the role.

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Like it or not, this is the time of the year that we write about players like Casey Janssen. There aren’t a whole lot of alternatives. Janssen himself just signed on with the Nationals, to some degree replacing Tyler Clippard at the cost of $5 million guaranteed with a second-year mutual option. The Nationals aren’t expecting Janssen to be as good as Clippard. The Nationals shouldn’t expect Janssen to be as good as Clippard. There’s a reason why Janssen came relatively inexpensively. The year he’s coming off — it was a decidedly unusual year.

There’s a ready-made excuse: Janssen took a quick trip during the All-Star break, and he returned from said trip with food poisoning that cost him a told amount of weight and an untold amount of energy. We’ve all probably experienced food poisoning at some point, and though we’ve experienced varying degrees of severity, it makes sense that it takes a while to get back to feeling 100%. And Janssen didn’t have to get back to feeling 100% as a normal person; he had to get back to feeling good enough to succeed as a pitcher in the major leagues. Janssen’s first half was better than his second half. We don’t know how much the illness damaged Janssen’s statistics.

But the food poisoning might explain only part of the picture. He was fine early on, and he was fine toward the end. Physically, I mean. Yet the numbers are strange, given Janssen’s record. It’s easy to focus on the strikeouts. It’s not just the strikeouts.

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Back in September, Jeff Sullivan wrote on this very weblog about The Three Most Distinctive Team Philosophies. On Tuesday, I published a piece exploring why Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Wily Peralta fails to record significant strikeouts totals despite possessing elite velocity. This is the result of those posts colliding.
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Toward the end of the day on Tuesday, the Boston Red Sox and Texas Rangers swapped Anthony Ranaudo and Robbie Ross. It doesn’t immediately seem like a trade of much consequence: Ranaudo’s a prospect with diminishing sheen, and Ross is coming off a pretty ugly experience as an attempted big-league starter. And, probably, it won’t be a trade of much consequence. Ranaudo seems like, if he’ll be anything, he’ll be a decent reliever. And Ross has looked like a lefty reliever who doesn’t do a great job of getting lefties out.

But — well, let me start with this. I’m about to focus on one side of this trade. I’ve heard all you guys complaining that we post too much content about the Red Sox. I understand where you’re coming from, and this isn’t going to make things better. But this isn’t about fitting into a pattern; I just find Ross to be more interesting, statistically, than I do Ranaudo. Ranaudo’s all scouting. Visual learners are going to like to talk about him. Me? I want to share something about Ross’ 2014 — something that might make him better than he seems.

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New commissioner Rob Manfred is clearly not afraid of change. In his first 24 hours on the job, he postulated about a future of the sport that included pitch clocks but excluded defensive shifts, among other tweaks. Unlike the former commissioner — who famously hated computers — Manfred is a proponent of technology and wants to make sure baseball keeps itself relevant in a changing landscape of how fans consume sports and entertainment. In this day and age of screens everywhere, shorter is often better, and the commissioner seems serious about addressing the pace of play issue in Major League Baseball.

However, his comments about the shift came in the context of a stated desire to breathe some offense back into a sport that has shifted heavily towards the pitching side of the equation in recent years. With offense trending downwards, the league clearly feels there is a point at which rules may have to be adjusted to restore the balance between offense and defense, just as the league took action in 1969 (by lowering the mound) and again in 1973 (by introducing the Designated Hitter). While I’m among those who do not believe that restricting the shift would have much of an effect on increasing offense, the willingness to consider it as a remedy suggests that Manfred believes that current offensive levels are a potential problem for the sport.

So on the one hand, the league would like to speed up the games; on the other hand, the league would like the games to include more run scoring. This seems to be a bit of a paradox, given that the act of scoring runs inherently means that more time is spent doing things besides ticking off some of the 54 outs — or 51 outs, if the home team protects a ninth inning lead — allotted for each contest. More offense means more at-bats and often can mean more pitching changes, and those two things generally mean longer games.

But how closely does run scoring track with length of game? Is it such a clear relationship that any increase in offense would be immediately met with a corresponding uptick in the number of minutes in a contest? I wasn’t actually sure, so with the help of some data from our friends at Baseball Prospectus and Baseball-Reference, I lined up the average length of game with average team runs per game for each season since 1950. The results are displayed in the chart below.

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