There is something to be said for getting the jump on the trading deadline. You get an opportunity to set the market, rather than react to it. Making a big move for pitching in advance of the trading deadline has other, salient benefits, such as the ability to get an extra start or two from your newly acquired arm(s) as you restructure your rotation going into, and out of the All Star break. This rings especially true to me personally, having been with the Brewers the year of the C.C. Sabathia trade, when we wound up needing almost every exceptional start and inning he gave us.

The A’s jumped the gun on this year’s deadline, getting not one, but two of the premier available arms, Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel, albeit for a hefty price. The A’s are obviously playing for now – so how much better does this deal make the A’s in the short term, and does it materially increase their chances of finally bringing home some hardware this fall? Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s accept that the St. Louis Cardinals could probably use multiple upgrades. Let’s accept that, publicly, the Cardinals are more focused on improving their offense than they are on improving their pitching. Let’s accept that improving a team’s offense is a complicated matter. Let’s accept that part of the problem, but not the whole of the problem, is the struggling Allen Craig. Now then, with all of that accepted, I want to show you an at bat. I promise it’ll go quick. Let’s watch Craig’s first showdown against Brandon Cumpton, from Wednesday night.

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Quick, name the worst team in baseball right now. The Houston Astros are a good choice, as they have lost at least 100 games in three consecutive seasons and are currently tied for the worst record in baseball. The Chicago Cubs are also a candidate, given that they are tied with the Astros in the win column and just traded away two of their best starting pitchers, weakening their roster going forward. Both teams are deep in rebuilding mode, and they are paying the price on the field each day.

However, I’d like to suggest that 2014’s worst team might not be either of these rebuilding clubs, but instead an organization that entered the year with high hopes of contention.

At 38-52, the Texas Rangers are just a game ahead of the Astros in the AL West standings, so if you were just judging by wins and losses, you wouldn’t put them behind Houston just yet. However, since the difference between a win and a loss can often come down to whether one crucial play gets made or not, a team’s record can be a bit misleading. Teams are more effectively evaluated by removing the context from when events occur, and just looking at the value of positive or negative events a team is involved in without regards to the situation of when those events happen.

At FanGraphs, we measure team performance through a model called BaseRuns, which calculates the number of runs a team would be expected to score and allow based on a normal distribution of events. With these expected run differentials, we can calculate team records based on overall performance without the influences of clutch performance, which is generally random and mostly beyond a team’s control.
And BaseRuns thinks that the Rangers have been baseball’s worst team so far this year, without any reasonable contender even coming all that close to their marks of futility.

Based on their total performance to date, we would have expected the Rangers to have been outscored by 105 runs, or a deficit of more than a full run per game played. The next worst total belongs to the Arizona Diamondbacks, but their expected run differential is only -62 runs. If you translate these expected runs scored and allowed totals into wins, the model would forecast the Rangers for a 34-56 record, four games worse than their actual record. As bad as they’ve played, the Rangers have actually been lucky to not be even worse off in the standings.

Read the rest on FoxSports.com.

Author’s note: literally simultaneous to the publishing of this post, news emerged that Tanaka is getting an MRI on his arm. Welp! Nothing below is entirely invalidated, but it’s been a while since I’ve had such lousy timing. Let us all learn a valuable lesson.

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When we analyze new players, there’s always a multi-step process. Analysis is nothing but a series of questions, and the first question is always the simplest: is the new player good? Overall, is the new player mediocre, average, good, or great? From there, over time, we start to get a little more detailed. You begin with finding out whether a player is good. Then you can start to understand how a player is good. Within the majors, there are plenty of good players, but they all achieve that level in their own particular ways, and it’s that variety that helps to keep this analysis fresh.

It didn’t take long to answer the first question about Masahiro Tanaka. Yeah, he’s good. He’s real good, as a matter of fact, and he’s one of the players most responsible for keeping the Yankees somewhere within the race. How does Tanaka succeed? Well, we all saw the splitter coming, and, yep, he throws a dynamite splitter, and with his command and unhittability, it’s hard to imagine Tanaka not being successful. By this point we know a lot about the Yankees’ new ace, but we are still filling in details. And here’s another one: Tanaka bears down with runners in scoring position. When situations are at their most dangerous, Tanaka has responded, in an interesting fashion.

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Speculation is part of the fun of watching and discussing sports. “Seriously, if he can keeping hitting like that and the other guy gets his act together at the plate, this offense is really going to be fun to watch in the second half.” This sort of casual speculation is not incompatible with trusting the projections. The line between speculation and analysis-based projection may not always be clear, though, and there are cases when it can be crossed to fit one’s own views.

It is all part of what I call the “Regression Game.” Okay, maybe that is not a great name, but it beats something like “The Process of Filtering Through Projections And Determining Collective True Talent.” Whatever the proper name, one can find it in various forms, particularly in the middle of the season. I am not saying one should never try to take into account various scenarios, that is, to play the game. Just like baseball, though, we need to make sure we are being consistent and playing the regression game the Right Way.

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We talk a fair bit about Joey Votto in these electronic pages. Some may say we do it too much, perhaps. But it’s for a reason. It’s not that he’s paying us to — he’s not paying me at least. He’s simply a somewhat-fascinating specimen as far as baseball players go. He’s smart, he’s a pretty good model of consistency, he never pops out.

He’s also been a small point of consternation between the statistically-inclined and fans that adhere to a more traditional understanding of the game. There’s been disagreements revolving around his penchant for walks, his attitude toward RBI, his preference to hit to all fields rather than try and pull everything for homeruns. But fans on both sides of the argument can agree that Joey Votto just hasn’t been very good this season.

Actually, allow me to check myself before I subsequently wreck myself. Joey Votto, at least on the whole, has actually been more than serviceable in 2014. As a hitter, he’s still been 28% better than league average according to wRC+. But the whole story doesn’t tell the most recent story, and the recent version of Joey Votto has been subpar by any standards. Read the rest of this entry »

An easy way to think about productivity is Efficiency x Frequency. If you’re really efficient at doing something, but you don’t do it very often, you won’t be very productive. Look at the career of Carlos Quentin. When he’s played, he’s always hit, but rarely is he healthy enough to play, so he hasn’t actually produced much. By the same measure, being frequently inefficient won’t get you very far, either. True production comes from maximizing your opportunities while remaining efficient.

A few weeks back, Jeff Sullivan wrote about Carlos Gomez and his unprecedented first-pitch swing rate. Gomez is swinging at the first pitch in over half of his plate appearances. That’s one of the highest rates in recent history. Not only that, but he’s doing some pretty serious damage on those pitches, to the tune of a 1.046 OPS.

Where there’s a leaderboard, there’s someone in second place. In this case, that guy’s first-pitch swing rate is still quite a bit lower than Gomez’s because, as we’ve covered, Gomez is in relatively uncharted territory. But still, there exists a guy who has the second-highest first-pitch swing rate in baseball. There has to. And that guy happens to be doing even more damage on those pitches than Gomez. That guy happens to be doing more damage on first pitches than just about anybody, really. That guy happens to be Mike Zunino.
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I’m going to be honest with you: I find it surprisingly easy to forget about Josh Hamilton. You think about the Angels team and you think about Mike Trout; you keep thinking about the Angels and you think about Albert Pujols. It doesn’t help that Hamilton was on the disabled list for so long earlier this year. But not actually that long ago, he was one of the most mysterious and volatile free agents in baseball history. This, to say the least, is something of an unexpected slide. It could be Trout is far too distracting, or, similarly, it could be Trout is kind of an attention black hole. Anyone who casts an eye to the Angels is pulled into Trout’s incredible player page. Hamilton, though, hasn’t ceased to be fascinating. This is maybe the quietest it’s ever been for him, but there’s something about Hamilton that keeps getting more extreme.

We’ve written plenty of times before about Hamilton’s plate discipline. Over the years, he’s hit, but he’s shown a lot of vulnerabilities — getting exposed for his over-aggressiveness. If you imagine a Hamilton swing, you might imagine a dinger he clobbers deep to straightaway center; or you might imagine him flailing at something slow in the dirt. He has something of a trademark flail, and in response, pitchers have thrown Hamilton fewer and fewer fastballs. This season, Hamilton’s seen the fewest fastballs yet. This season, Hamilton entered uncharted territory.

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Jeff Samardzija has some old-school in him when it comes to pitch counts. Ditto work loads for late-inning relievers. The 29-year-old righthander feels starters should be given more of an opportunity to work deeper into games. As for closers, whatever happened to the multiple-inning save?

On Sunday, Samardzija went seven innings and threw 108 pitches in his first outing since being traded from the Cubs to Oakland. His high for the year is 126, which came on May 5 when he went nine innings and earned a no-decision. The game two months ago is more in line with his way of thinking.

“Back in the day, the game was left in the starter’s hands,” Samardzija told me three days before he was dealt. “If the starter pitched well, he was given his 120 pitches. The game was decided by the starting pitchers. It’s different now and I think that’s unfortunate. When you get into tough situations, regardless of your pitch count, a lot of times a reliever is brought in. I understand why – it’s to preserve the game — but you have to keep your relievers’ arms fresh too. I like the idea of the starters deciding what happens in the game.”

Given the spate of pitchers undergoing Tommy John surgery, injury fears have an ever-increasing influence on workloads. The old-school righty doesn’t see a direct correlation. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: I made a huge screw-up, and for whatever reason, I didn’t catch it, but Dustin Pedroia didn’t win the MVP award in 2011. He won it in 2008. I’m an idiot. Please try to enjoy the praise of Ian Kinsler without regard for the fact that the primary point of the post is wrong.

Over the weekend, the All-Star rosters were announced, and Ian Kinsler’s name was not among the participants. This probably isn’t a huge shock, given that Robinson Cano is one of the game’s most visible stars and Jose Altuve leads the league in batting average. Kinsler’s value has always been less obvious than many bigger name stars.

But just for fun, I’d like to offer a comparison between Kinsler’s 2014 season and a recent season from a second baseman that resulted in an MVP award resulted in a ninth place finish and this writer looking like a moron. For the sake of the comparison, Kinsler’s numbers have been extrapolated out to match the same number of plate appearances as Pedroia received that year.

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