Archive for Daily Graphings

By the admission of the player himself, John Smoltz had a unique career that doesn’t quite stack up against the traditional standards set by past Hall of Fame inductees. He had two careers, and “each doesn’t qualify a hall of fame type career,” as the pitcher said on a conference call after he was inducted on Tuesday.

By definition, his career is now a Hall of Fame career, but is it possible that he stacks up better against his new colleagues if you consider his career as two halves of two separate induction-worthy careers?

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Sometimes, you read something or find a stat that changes your perception of a player. It probably shouldn’t be just one stat that changes your entire perception, but seeing that one stat may cause you to dig a little deeper into who that player is and what they’ve been doing, and your collective research could lead to a shift in perception.

Hey, Todd Frazier.

I spend enough time on FanGraphs that sometimes I forget about the little, exclusive stats offered by other websites. It’s fun to go dig around in the lesser-known parts of a site like BaseballReference, because it can make you think about things you might not have thought about while digging around on FanGraphs. Some deep BR digging led to a post I wrote a couple months back about David Price and the art of the three-pitch strikeout, and now it’s going to lead to a post about Todd Frazier.

The metric that caught my eye is called PwrSpd. It was developed by Bill James, and it’s a very basic metric. The leaderboard that caught my eye was topped by Carlos Gomez in 2014, who’s probably one of the first few people to come to mind when you think of elite combinations of power and speed. Ian Desmond was second and Jacoby Ellsbury was fourth. Mike Trout is in the top 10, and so is Andrew McCutchen. These names all make sense.

But sitting up there at No. 3, right above Ellsbury, is Todd Frazier. It sticks out like a sore thumb when you look at it. Really, it’s just a fancy way of saying Frazier was one five players who had 20+ homers and 20+ steals last year, alongside Gomez, Desmond, Michael Brantley and Brian Dozier. But either way you put it, that’s surprising. In the top 10, you’ve got five center fielders, two shortstops, a second basemen, a left fielder, and Todd Frazier. It’s not a top 10 meant to be inhabited by third baseman, yet there he is.
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Among others, baseball’s Hall of Fame will prepare to welcome Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson. For them, there was zero suspense: Hall of Famers don’t get more automatic, and as easy as it is to focus on the fact that neither player was unanimous, the percentage matters less than the ultimate outcome. The voting process is a little bit broken, but it would have to be in complete and utter shambles to deny Martinez or Johnson entry — and they’ll no longer have to appear on any ballot. Two of the very greatest ever have been successfully and swiftly voted into the place intended to recognize the very greatest ever.

Of course, neither pitcher was a borderline candidate. Every so often the game has players who are just exceptional, and when you go into the data, you stumble upon fun facts proving said exceptional-ness. For example, let’s consider starting pitcher strikeout rates from 1999. The top of the list, with a 100-inning minimum:

1. Pedro Martinez, 37.5% strikeouts
2. Randy Johnson, 33.7%
3. Tim Hudson, 22.8%

That’s stupid. That leaderboard is stupid. It doesn’t make sense that pitchers could be so good. Not as starters, and not for as long as they were.

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A lot of professional baseball players – especially pitchers – play the guitar. Evan Meek is among the best of them. The 31-year-old right-handed reliever takes music nearly as seriously as he does pitching. He’s been playing for two decades and composes his own songs.

Meek, who has a 3.63 ERA over 179 career outings, broke into the big leagues with the Pirates in 2008 and spent this past season with the Orioles. He will always be known for giving up Derek Jeter’s storybook final hit at Yankee Stadium, and he just might write some guitar hits if he chooses to pursue a second career.

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Meek on his pitch repertoire: “I throw a four-seam fastball, but most all of my fastballs cut, so it’s really a cutter. I also throw a slider and a split change-up.

“My usage kind of varies over the course of a year. It’s pretty rare you have success with all three pitches when you’re relieving in short outings. One day the slider shows up and the split doesn’t, or maybe the split shows up and the slider or fastball doesn’t. Not all days are the same.”

On his guitar repertoire: “A lot of what I play depends on my mood. What’s my vibe that day? I use the word ‘vibe’ a lot because it kind of translates to the music I like to play. If I got a lot of sleep and am energetic, I might play something more upbeat. If I’m tired, I might play something slower.

“I’ve played in bands, mostly rock. There have been acoustic sets, basically getting a group of guys together to play. The stuff I do now is mostly with a travel guitar. I do a lot of hotel-room playing. Sometimes I’ll go down to a lobby, or somewhere quiet, to play.”

On pitching and playing: “There are definitely similarities between the two. When you play in a band, there’s a plan – there’s a set – and a way you go about doing things. On the mound it’s the same thing. Read the rest of this entry »

Because I’m a baseball weblogger and because certain members of my family and community are aware that I’m a baseball weblogger, some of them have asked me — and others will likely ask me at some point this week — “Hey Carson Harrington Cistulli, what do you think about the Hall of Fame voting?”

Why they continue to refer to me by my full name remains a mystery. With regard to their question, however, my answer is generally something along the lines of “Hmph.” Not particularly satisfying, I recognize. So far as takes go, it is decidedly frigid.

As a member of the BBWAA, I’ll theoretically be invited to answer this question in an official capacity about eight years from now. (I don’t think that will actually happen, as all signs indicate that my admission to the Association was the product of a clerical error. For the moment, however, I’ll proceed as if it weren’t.) If and when I receive a ballot for the Hall of Fame, I’ll dedicate sufficiently careful scrutiny to such an endeavor.

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Hello again! This is the National League version of the American League post from a little earlier. In case said American League post contained certain calculation errors, those same calculation errors will be repeated in this very post, as both posts have been written back-to-back and pre-scheduled. In case no such errors are present, you’re welcome, for the absence of errors. This is a link to the NL voting post from last Monday. I don’t know why that would be of use to you now, but there’s a lot of things I don’t know.

So, in this post, a data review, in the same format as the AL post. The same caveats apply: I might’ve biased some of the voters. The pool of voters isn’t identical across the board in identity or size, and about those sizes — the sample sizes don’t number in the hundreds of thousands, or millions. Still, the information will be analyzed, because if the information were not analyzed, what would have been the point of the posts last week? Let’s tie up loose ends, together.

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Hello! Early last week, in part out of curiosity and in part because I had things to do, I asked you to do a bunch of voting related to the site’s Steamer team projections. I put up two posts, and here’s the one about the American League. Basically, we lean on the projections a lot, but we seldom ask for feedback, and I wanted to know how the community felt about projected team records, based on where things stood last Monday. Now, some things have changed since Monday, but nothing important has changed since Monday — excepting, say, Seth Smith — so circumstances remain mostly identical.

At the time, I promised I’d eventually review the data. Here now, the data shall be reviewed, and in this post, I’ll consider the results from the AL polls. I know it’s not perfect science. Different people voted in different team polls. Different numbers of people voted in each team poll. I probably to some extent biased the voters by offering commentary before each poll was embedded. Nevertheless, information is information, and, let’s see what we generated! With which projections do people agree the most? With which projections do people agree the least?

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Like the draft year, the baseball offseason has a feel to it once you’ve been around the game for awhile. Like some draft years, some offseasons are just different, and we are currently living through one of them. The 2005 draft was different; if you had scouting director or national crosschecker-level responsibilities, you stood a good chance of seeing a future major-league All Star on any given day, and you knew it. This offseason, after what seemed to be a few years of relative winter calm, all hell has seemingly broken loose, especially with regard to position-player movement. Today, let’s take a look at team position-player turnover in the divisional era, to get a sense for the historical norms to which 2015 will someday be compared. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been in love with contact rate from the beginning. Admittedly, it doesn’t provide a lot of information you can’t already figure out from strikeout rate, but I like contact rate for its granularity. It’s one of the first stats I look at for pitchers, and it seems like a pretty pure indicator of domination over opponents. What could be better, after all, than a pitch a batter can’t hit? An out on a ball in play, I suppose, but balls in play are dangerous. Nothing dangerous about a swing and miss.

As much as I like contact rate, though, I’ve never thought to try to break it down. Most analysis with contact rate is performed using overall contact rate. Sometimes, it’s using in-zone contact rate, or out-of-zone contact rate. But what I found myself in the mood to do is try to break the numbers down a little bit by count. A thank you, as usual, is extended to Baseball Savant. Because I haven’t spent much time with this data, I can’t really tell you what it means yet, but, you’re here because you want to further your understanding of baseball. I think exploration’s justifiable for exploration’s sake.

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The Phillies just traded Marlon Byrd to the Reds for a pitcher that couldn’t crack Cincinnati’s top ten prospect lists. Could the Phillies have done better than Ben Lively for their asset? The answer to that question depends on deception.

Even though Byrd’s old, he’s been an above-average player the last two years, and he’s signed to a nice contract. Ever since he started swinging harder, missing more, and hitting the ball in the air more, he’s showed enough power to make up for declining defense and patience. Given his publicly-admitted adjustments, and the now two-year sample of evidence, maybe the deceptive thing about Byrd is that he’s not the same player that Steamer is projecting for a half win.

If you base Byrd’s trade value on recent outfield signings instead of straight dollars per win, he has more trade value. In terms of on-field production over the last two years, he compares favorably to another older corner outfielder that got two years and $21 million from the Mets at least. He’d even represent some surplus value when compared to Michael Cuddyer, probably.

Source: FanGraphs — Marlon Byrd, Michael Cuddyer

So you can see that there’s probably not a lot of consensus when it comes to Marlon Byrd’s trade value. There’s even less consensus about the value of the prospect going back to the Phillies.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.