This morning, I was playing around with some of our plate discipline calculations. I really like the metrics we have for measuring a player’s approach at the plate, but because they are broad categories that combine numerous variables into one number, there are some questions that none of them answer all that well on their own. For instance, if you just wanted to know who the most unrepentant hacker in 2014 has been, you could simply sort the leaderboards by Swing%, and you’d see Chris Johnson at the very top, swinging at a higher rate of pitches (57.1%) than anyone else in baseball.

But knowing that Johnson has swung at the highest percentage of pitches doesn’t really make him the game’s most aggressive hitter, as part of his high swing rate is that he’s been thrown an above average number of strikes. Pablo Sandoval is right behind Johnson in overall swing rate, but his Zone% is 11 percentage points lower than Johnson’s, so he’s getting far fewer pitches to hit but still chasing the same amount. By any reasonable measure of hackiness, one would have to conclude that Sandoval has been more aggressive than Johnson.

Of course, we have a measure of swings at out-of-zone pitches, which is a pretty good way to measure which players fit the hacker mold. However, by O-Swing%, Matt Adams ranks #2 in baseball, but his overall swing rate only ranks 17th. Is he one of the game’s most deliberate free swingers, or does he just struggle to recognize balls from strikes?

When I think about the hacker label for a hitter, I think of guys who swing as if they had made up their mind before the pitcher even started his delivery. Location and pitch type are secondary to the desire to just put the bat on the ball, and they won’t be deterred from swinging no matter what the pitcher does. So, I thought that perhaps we could better identify those types of hitters by looking at a ratio of two of our plate discipline stats, and so out of curiosity, I divided Swing% by Zone% to get a ratio of swings-per-balls-in-the-zone. Others have created far more complex and mathematically sound formulas to get at the same idea, but there’s value in ease of calculation, so I was curious how Swings Per In-Zone Pitch would do.

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The draft is now behind us and the summer will soon be in full swing. For more than two-thirds of the population of baseball clubs, participation in a pennant race is currently a legitimate consideration, thanks both to general parity and the presence of a second wild card club in both leagues. What about the other teams? Some, like the Houston Astros and Chicago Cubs, likely suspected that this would be their fate, and likely long ago put summer roster management plans in place. Others, however, like the Tampa Bay Rays and – in their minds, at least – the Philadelphia Phillies expected to contend, and now find their reality to be much different. How might the summer progress for unexpected sellers such as these? Read the rest of this entry »

We take Mike Trout for granted. It’s not a thing that’s unique to Mike Trout. We take all consistently great baseball players for granted. We take all consistently great anythings for granted. That’s why we’re always trying to figure out the next big thing — it doesn’t take long to get used to the current big thing. Mike Trout, right now, beats the hell out of Gregory Polanco, but Polanco might be of greater current interest, because he’s fresh and he could become a star. Trout’s already been a star for years. This is just part of having a human brain — we acclimate. We’re incredible at it. It has its upsides.

Once you start taking a player for granted, though, it’s that much more difficult to really appreciate what the player’s able to do. The best players aren’t guys regularly doing amazing things — the best players are guys regularly doing good things, some percentage more often than the inferior players. Usually those are standard good things. We get to the point where, in order to feel an appreciation, we need something extraordinary. So let’s seize a chance. Feel like you’ve been taking Mike Trout for granted? You’re not alone. Let’s watch him do something extraordinary, to remember that he is extraordinary.

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What’s an “average” fastball velocity? This year, it’s 91.9 mph. Last year, it was 92.0 mph. In 2012, it was 91.8 mph. We could go back further, but since that’s all pretty consistent and this isn’t really going to be about how hard pitchers throw anyway, three years is fine. We can say that 92 mph is pretty much the average fastball speed in Major League Baseball.

So with that knowledge in mind, here’s what I wanted to know: what hitters have to deal with the most heat that’s at average and above velocities? And how do they handle it? Fortunately, we have Baseball Savant, so we can look at this pretty easily. With a minimum of 500 fastballs seen — for reference, Matt Carpenter and Brian Dozier have each seen over 1,200 total pitches, so 500 pitches would be fewer than half of what an everyday player would have received — there’s only three hitters who have seen at least 35 percent of pitches coming in at 92 or higher:

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Dave Wallace played several minor league seasons in the Indians organization as a catcher before beginning his coaching career as a staff assistant in Cleveland from 2009-10. He has moved his way through the Indians organization quickly, managing the short-season Mahoning Valley Scrappers in 2011, the Class-A Lake County Captains in 2012 and the High-A Carolina Mudcats in 2013 before joining the Double-A Akron RubberDucks this year.

It’s no secret that, as a small-market ballclub, Cleveland has one of the most sabermetrically-inclined front offices in baseball alongside organizations like Oakland, Tampa Bay and Houston. After reading Alex Kaufman’s great piece on the Indians DiamondView system, I wanted to know how much of that trickled down to the minor leagues and what Wallace’s stance was with regards to analytics. Wallace mentioned he is a regular reader of FanGraphs and that one of his favorite things to do is comb through our glossary and learn about new stats. We talked about advanced numbers, their prevalence and role in the minor leagues and how he uses them as a manager:

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Jair Jurrjens is on the comeback trail. The 28-year-old righthander signed a minor league deal with Cincinnati in late May and is currently pitching for Triple-A Louisville. If he can approach his old form, the former Atlanta Braves stalwart could give the Reds rotation a shot in the arm.

Knee problems caused Jurrjens to spiral from solid starter to waiver-wire fodder. In 2009, he pitched 215 innings and went 14-10 with a 2.60 ERA. Two years later – despite discomfort in a surgically-repaired meniscus – he went 13-6, with a 2.96 ERA, in 152 innings. Then came the real pain. His 2012 and 2013 seasons were a velocity-challenged train wreck spent primarily in the minor leagues.

“The last couple of years have been stressful and frustrating,” Jurrjens admitted. “My arm was never a problem, I just didn’t have the strength to push off after the surgery to my right knee. I wasn’t using my lower body – I was throwing more with my arm – and wasn’t getting full extension. Read the rest of this entry »

After another late-game meltdown, Grant Balfour is officially out as closer for the Tampa Bay Rays, at least for now, and the Rays will go closer-by-committee for a little while. While no one player can doom an entire team, Balfour’s problems are one of the primary reasons the Rays have the worst record in baseball, especially given that Balfour’s $6 million salary is a larger share of Tampa’s budget than it would be for many of their competitors. But interestingly, Balfour isn’t really an outlier here. This year, nearly every team who spent resources to acquire a “proven closer” would have been better off lighting their money on fire instead.

While the definition of a “proven closer” is up for interpretation, I would suggest that seven relief pitchers changed teams last winter and were paid something of a premium due to their ninth inning experience. They are effective relievers and would have been valuable even without ninth inning experience, but their end-of-game history likely earned them a little more money than they would have had they been career setup men. Those seven, and their contracts, are listed below.

Joe Nathan: 2 years, $20 million
Brian Wilson: 2 years, $18.5 million
Joaquin Benoit: 2 years, $15.5 million
Fernando Rodney: 2 years, $14 million
Grant Balfour: 2 years, $12 million
Jim Johnson: 1 year, $10 million
Edward Mujica: 2 years, $9.5 million

Six of them changed teams as free agents, while Johnson was traded in a salary dump by the Orioles, and was effectively available to any team who wanted to pay the amount he would get in his final trip through arbitration. Here’s how those seven pitchers have done this year, with their 2013 performance listed below for reference.

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The Mets are seven games under .500 three-plus years into the tenure of the current front office, so maybe it was inevitable that someone got fired. And with 252 runs scored, the offense is middle of the pack (ninth in the National League by runs per game). Hitting coach Dave Hudgens made an easy target for someone in the Mets’ organization. But was it the right move?

That’s a hard question to answer. But by focusing on the peripherals of the team, and perhaps even the career of Lucas Duda, who played all but a hundred or so of his plate appearances under the tutelage of Hudgens, maybe we can try to evaluate the move.

In some ways, focusing on results understates the problem. Yes, the Mets are middle of the pack in runs, but their underlying numbers are worse. Their weighted runs created — calculated by weighting each offensive event according to its impact on the game in the past — is 11% worse than league average and near the bottom of the National League. They walk more than any team in the big leagues, but with that walk rate has come a high strikeout rate (sixth-worst)… and none of the power that usually comes with taking pitches. The Mets have the second-worst slugging numbers in the National League.

Of course, the hitting coach can only work on the process, he can’t hit the ball. Research suggests that the major axis between hitting coaches is between those that preach patience and those that preach aggressiveness.

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The surprising part wasn’t that Kendrys Morales signed immediately after he was no longer tied to compensation. The surprising part was that Kendrys Morales signed with the Minnesota Twins, instead of any of the more obvious possibilities. When Morales signed, the Twins were 29-31, and they fancy themselves a surprising potential contender, which tells you something about where the expectations were set a few months ago. The Twins got Morales for about $7.6 million and four months, and the organizational quotes you hear are full of optimism and positivity.

A rundown, courtesy of Rhett Bollinger:

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Over the winter, Max Scherzer turned down an offer from the Tigers that would have paid him $144 million over six years, and instead, decided to play out his final season in Detroit and then see kind of offers he will get as a free agent. Given pitcher attrition rates, Scherzer was certainly taking on a significant risk to pass up that kind of contract. Jeff Zimmerman’s research pegged Scherzer as having a 31% chance of landing on the disabled list at some point in 2014, and a significant injury likely would have forced Scherzer to forego pursuing any kind of long-term deal this winter. By turning down the offer, Scherzer appeared to have made a big bet on himself and his future health.

However, as Scherzer noted to Tom Verducci over the weekend, he actually hasn’t taken on nearly as much risk as we might have thought. Instead, he sold the risk to an insurance company for what was presumably a better rate than the one the Tigers offered. And I fully expect this to become a trend, with third-party insurance agencies stepping in to correct a market imbalance in Major League Baseball.

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