A few weeks back, we took a look at the 2014 offensive ball-in-play leaders and laggards from both leagues. As the second half of the offseason kicks into gear, let’s now take a look at the same information from the pitcher’s perspective. Today: the American League. Read the rest of this entry »
Clayton Kershaw is coming off what was legitimately one of the best starting-pitcher seasons of all time. Though he would miss a few turns due to injury, that problem was quickly forgotten, as Kershaw still approached 200 innings and finished with both an ERA and an FIP that were half the league average. There was one stretch where Kershaw didn’t allow a single run over four consecutive starts, and that stretch was bookended by a pair of one-run outings. Yet as amazing as Kershaw was, there was one game where he allowed seven runs in under two innings to the Diamondbacks. Those seven runs were 17% of Kershaw’s regular-season total. In July, I tried to investigate what went wrong.
Kershaw, in 2014, had one of the better pitcher seasons ever. Pedro Martinez, in 1999, had maybe the best pitcher season ever. Pedro posted the lowest FIP- ever by a starter, at 28. The next-best mark is 36, also posted by Pedro. The best non-Pedro mark is 45. Over the course of baseball history, that 1999 FIP- is a full five standard deviations better than the mean. Pedro’s strikeout rate that season was 5.4 standard deviations better than the mean. I should note that this doesn’t include what Pedro did in the All-Star Game, or in the playoffs. In the All-Star Game, he struck out five of six batters, with one reaching on an error. In the playoffs, Pedro spun 17 shutout innings, allowing five hits and a .267 OPS. Pedro Martinez, that season, was probably the best that any starting pitcher has been. The statistics are unreal even before you remember to adjust them for the era.
Yet on July 18, Pedro faced the Florida Marlins and couldn’t get out of the fourth. His final line shows nine runs on a dozen hits, with no other season run total exceeding four. That year’s Marlins had one of the worst offenses in either league, and they’d lose 98 games. Just as Kershaw’s disaster was fascinating, so, too, was Pedro’s, particularly in retrospect. How did one of the best pitchers ever, in probably the best pitcher season ever, get killed at home against a bad team on the wrong side of a fire sale?
There’s nothing more enviable than a collection of stars. Generally speaking, people tend to focus on the top of a given roster, because that’s where you find the most impressive players, the players most likely to make a significant difference. The fantasy world operates like a video game with injuries turned off: you go in with your starting lineup and starting rotation, and you never need to replace anyone, and everyone’s competent. Every so often, teams do have sufficient health to be able to rely on the expected regulars. But more often than not, depth becomes a major factor. Sometimes this is even intentional — teams will accumulate depth in lieu of adding higher-quality starters. We’ve seen the A’s, for example, focus on depth, at practically every position. It’s not the most important thing; it’s just an important thing, frequently.
And it can be a tricky thing to measure, ahead of time. You can go about it by feel, on a case-by-case basis, but I thought I’d try something quick and easy. Which teams project to have the most and least depth for the season ahead, based on where things stand today? Presented below is not the final word, but it should be at least a starting point. Some numbers will change when, say, Max Scherzer and James Shields make up their minds, but they aren’t going to flip this graph on its head.
By the time you are voted into the Hall of Fame, you gather as many urban legends as legitimate accolades: Babe Ruth called his shot, Harmon Killebrew was the model for the MLB logo, Wade Boggs drank 64 beers on a flight once. It has been said that peak Pedro Martinez had four pitches and each was the best of its type in baseball. Legit or legend?
The current crop of Hall of Fame inductees are the first that have any data that give us any hope of answering this question. The PITCHf/x era is said to have started in 2007, and that is indeed when the numbers linking individual pitches to their outcomes begin.
Unfortunately, it’s not very instructive to say that Martinez’s changeup had the 42nd-best swinging strike rate among the 78 pitchers that threw at least 300 changeups in 2008. Pedro was 38 years old that year, and though he pitched over 100 innings, by wins above replacement it was the worst effort of his career. Not a great time to test the legend.
Over at FanGraphs, though, we have Baseball Info Solutions data back to 2002. That year, Pedro won 20 games and had probably the third-best season of his career. He was 31, and it wasn’t his best year, and the numbers come to us from humans rather than computers, but it’s the best we can do with available statistics.
Here’s how Pedro’s change, curve, and fastball did that season by swinging strikes. Whiffs are not the only way to judge a pitch, but they are what we have on hand currently — and the pitcher never had an above-average overall grounder rate, so it’s not likely his individual pitches were elite by that measure either. By whiffs at least, he was comfortably above the league’s averages with those three pitches.
As most of you know, I grew up in Seattle. My parents owned their own small business not far from Sea-Tac Airport, which meant that I spent a lot of after-school time at an auto parts store, trying to entertain myself with things that were of minimal interest to a child. But the store had a radio, and in the spring and summer, KIRO 710 broadcast baseball games. Combined with access to 25-cent packs of baseball cards at the 7-11 down the street, baseball became my babysitter.
We didn’t have a television until I was a bit older, and my parents worked too much to take us to the Kingdome very often, so I fell in love with the sport through the radio broadcasts of Dave Niehaus. I was taught about the game by his play-by-play calls, as neither of my parents were big sports fans, and the mid-80s Mariners weren’t exactly the kind of team that drew in anyone but those who truly loved the sport. I essentially became the sole reason my Mom and Dad paid any attention to baseball at all; even their moderate interest was mostly because, being good parents, they wanted to be involved in the things that I enjoyed.
I’m writing about this because, two weeks ago, I became a father, and in between diaper changes, I’ve been thinking about my son’s future relationship with baseball. How am I going to introduce him to the game? How am I going to teach him not just about the sport of baseball, but about being a fan?
Do you guys want to yell about the Hall of Fame just a little bit more? I feel like there hasn’t been enough of that lately. It’s not my intention for this post to cause yelling, but it seems any discussion about the Hall of Fame inevitably leads to yelling, so let’s get to it.
Earlier this off-season, the Chicago Cubs began work on their long-awaited renovations to Wrigley Field. The team launched phase one of the project in October, tearing down the stadium’s existing bleachers with the hope of rebuilding and expanding them in time for Opening Day. In addition, the $575 million project will eventually include new clubhouses, luxury suites, concession areas and signage throughout the stadium — as well as the construction of a nearby hotel and office-building complex.
Unless, that is, owners of the rooftops overlooking Wrigley Field get their way. These building owners have filed two lawsuits over the past four months — the first coming this past August, and the second on Thursday — in an attempt to stop the renovations. In particular, the rooftop owners fear that two new scoreboards to be constructed as part of the renovation project will block their views into the stadium, threatening the roughly $20 million in annual ticket revenue the rooftops currently generate.
In an interesting twist, though, rather than suing the Cubs, the building owners have instead sued the City of Chicago in the hopes of having the renovation halted. Understanding why the rooftop owners would sue the city, rather than the team, requires some knowledge of the lengthy history of the dispute.
Hyun-Jin Ryu isn’t the best Dodger starter, because Clayton Kershaw exists. He’s not the second-best Dodger starter, because Zack Greinke exists. If you can’t even make a case for being one of the two best starters on your own team, it’s going to be very difficult to make the case that you’re one of the better starters in the game. “No. 3 starter” just doesn’t have that much appeal to it, as recent third bananas like Doug Fister or Anibal Sanchez can attest to.
Being fortunate — or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it — enough to be paired with the truly elite starters in the game shouldn’t affect how you’re viewed, of course. Any player should be judged on his own merits and compared to the full population of pitchers, not just those who happen to share a clubhouse. In the same way that it’s foolish to think that Maikel Franco and Addison Russell are equal players just because they are ranked as the No. 2 prospect for their respective franchises, you can’t assume that Ryu and, say, Ricky Nolasco are of equal value because they’re the third-best starter on their team.
All of which is a long way of getting to the point, which is this: Ryu has proven himself to be one of baseball’s outstanding pitchers in his two seasons in America, and none of us — us here at FanGraphs included, unfortunately — seem to talk about him that way.
The White Sox have had an incredibly busy offseason, but the goal’s always been clear. The Padres, too, have had a busy offseason, striving for an obvious purpose. Right before the Padres took the industry by storm, it was the Dodgers who were making moves every half hour, toward, again, a clear goal of contention. The A’s have had their own busy offseason, but theirs had been more confusing. Giving three guaranteed years to Billy Butler seemed like a move for a team trying to win. Dealing away a long-term asset like Josh Donaldson seemed like the opposite. To Oakland’s credit, though, they stuck to their own message — they weren’t trying to rebuild. They don’t believe in rebuilds. And now we can see how things all come together.
When the Rays signed Asdrubal Cabrera, after having acquired Nick Franklin last summer, they were provided the flexibility to move Ben Zobrist in advance of his contract year. Zobrist, of course, appealed to just about every team in baseball, on account of his talent and flexibility. Now Zobrist has been moved, and he’s been moved to the A’s, along with Yunel Escobar, in exchange for John Jaso, Daniel Robertson, and Boog Powell. The trade’s interesting from the Tampa Bay side, just because it involves moving one of the best players on the team. And the trade’s interesting from the Oakland side, because it adds a great player at little short-term cost. Score yet another point for those who issue reminders that you shouldn’t judge offseasons until they’re complete.
Chris Archer’s attitude toward stats is a mix of new-school and old-school. The 26-year-old righty realizes pitcher Wins and ERA are influenced by things he can’t control. The number he cares most about, from a personal perspective, is innings pitched.
Archer threw 194-and-two-third innings for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2014. He did so effectively, fashioning a 3.33 ERA and a nearly identical 3.39 FIP over 32 starts. Pitching in his second full season, his W-L record was 10-9.
He fell short of his goal, albeit just barely.
“The one goal I had this year was to pitch 200 innings,” Archer told me. “If you’re pitching into the seventh pretty much every time, that’s the number you reach. For me, elite starters pitch 200 innings because, A: They’re making every start, and B: They’re keeping their team in every game. The manager’s not going to leave you out there if you’re not throwing well.”
The hard-throwing right-hander wasn’t pulled early very often last year. He went at least six innings 23 times, and on just three occasions fewer than five. He surrendered four or more earned runs only eight times.
Archer pitched better than his 10-9 record. In 14 of his 32 starts, he got either a loss or a no-decision while allowing three or fewer earned runs. No teardrops were shed – at least not for selfish reasons. Read the rest of this entry »
