If it seems like we’ve written about the Dodgers second base competition a lot this offseason, it’s because we have. Two months ago, I looked into the questionable depth the team had at the position; a few weeks ago, Eno Sarris revisited the situation to see whether it would present a problem. Now, barely more than a week before the team kicks off the season in Australia, there appears to be a winner, at least if you believe this beat writer or that one or that one, and it’s not $28 million Cuban import Alexander Guerrero: it’s former shortstop Dee Gordon, who has 3.2 career innings at the position.

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A variety of indicators tell us that Spring Training is here. The “Best Shape of My Life” stories, the ” _____ has reported to camp” tweets, and pitchers coming to camp talking about new pitches.

When not staring out the window waiting for spring to arrive, pitchers have a lot of time to review the previous season. As Albert Einstein famously said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That quote fits pitchers extremely well. Sometimes, they themselves realize their process is not working and want to add a new pitch. Survivor bias can set in for pitchers as they see new blood coming to camp and want to stand out from the crowd in camp. Other times, the team will have seen something and want to correct it.

Recently retired pitcher Jensen Lewis believes other factors are in play as well. “Adding pitches in camp rarely happens for an established pitcher unless the following happens,” Lewis said.

• Performance of the pitcher suffers so much that the front office or coaching staff decides it is necessary to add a pitch to survive at the major league level
• A veteran pitcher adds something to compensate for a loss of stuff/velocity
• You add a pitch by mistake just by playing catch or trying something different in a side session

“Most of the time, we pitchers will mess around playing catch and during side sessions with grips and anything we glean from fellow teammates or opposing pitchers, ” he said. “The art and craft of pitching is ever-evolving and thus breeds multiple avenues to get hitters out. Remember, deception is the common theme every pitcher is trying to accentuate,” Lewis said. “Only a few dozen guys have the overpowering stuff that you simply have no chance to hit. The rest of us go about each year tweaking our arsenals to further that deception. It boils down to one simple creed: hitters get themselves out; pitchers merely develop and hone ways to miss the sweet spot of the barrel on a consistent basis.”

Lewis went on to say that, “It’s your career, so any inch of ground you can gain by adding to your pre-existing repertoire or augmenting that arsenal through an additional pitch is completely individual. Pitchers can get really mental and think they need a new pitch when they merely need only to refine what they throw and have confidence in what they throw.”

Josh Zeid from the Houston Astros shared similar thoughts. “In this game, everyone is evolving. The hitters are getting better, and the other pitchers are getting better, ” he said, “so if I can add a pitch or fine tune a pitch so much that it gives me another weapon, I have to give myself that chance.” Zeid has been working more on his splitter in camp and says, “It’s a pitch that I have used sparingly to lefties and it’s given me a leg up when I’ve used it.” He is gaining confidence in his ability to throw it to both sides of the plate, and would like to use it against righties, “to stop them from sitting away as it brings a pitch back into them.”

Adding the pitch was more of a self evaluation for Zeid over the winter and he says the coaches have been receptive and supportive of the idea. He noticed right-handed batters had more success against him than left-handed batters (.305 batting average vs .178 batting average) last season, so he feels that, “without trying to change a whole lot, I can adapt and mold what I already have to give myself a better chance against all hitters.” He plans to continue working on the pitch in camp and once camps breaks and recognizes that if it is going to be a successful pitch for him in the long run, he has to use it in games. “If I’m confident in it AND having success with it, then I can’t wait to use it a lot more,” Zeid said.

This spring, over 25 pitchers are working on new pitches in camp. The reports have come from stories, both in print and on radio, and sometimes as in the case of Brian Wilson, the pitcher just surprises us by whipping out the pitch unannounced on the mound.

These are the things pitchers are reportedly working on this spring:

• Heath Bell – adding a splitter
• Dellin Betances – adding a slurve
• Tony Cingrani – adding a slider
• Jorge De Leon – adding a splitter
• Ross Detwiler – adding a cutter
• Sean Doolittle – adding a slider and a changeup
• Danny Farquhar – a two-seam fastball
• Brandon Gomes – adding a cutter
• A.J. Griffin – dropping cutter; using more changeups
• Jim Henderson – adding a changeup
• Phil Hughes – scrapping his slider, going with a cutter and curveball instead
• Kevin Jepsen – adding a changeup
• Brad Lincoln – adding a split-changeup
• Mark Lowe – adding a cutter
• Zach McAllister – adding a slider
• Jake McGee – adding a curveball
• Darren O’Day – adding a changeup
• Jake Odorizzi – adding a splitter
• Martin Perez – adding a cutter
• Kevin Quackenbush – adding a splitter
• CC Sabathia – adding a cutter
• Tyler Skaggs: Angels undoing what Diamondbacks did to his mechanics
• Stephen Strasburg – adding a slider
• Marcus Stroman – adding a split-changeup
• Koji Uehara – adding a cutter
• Tom Wilhelmsen – adding a cutter
• Randy Wolf – adding a splitter

Some of the pitchers, in explaining their new pitches to the media this spring, echoing the insights from Lewis and Zeid. Sabathia is incorporating a true cut fastball this season, under the encouragement of Andy Pettitte, to help with his decreasing velocity. O’Day is adding a changeup to help make him more effective against left-handed batters. Cincinnati brought the slider to Cingrani. McGee, coming off a season in which he allowed the fifth-fewest balls in play for all relievers, bringing his curveball out of the mothballs. He told Neil Solondz of the Rays Radio broadcast team that he feels the larger speed differential will make his fastball even more effective.

Martin Perez tells Richard Durrett he is adding the cutter this season because he wanted a power pitch in his arsenal:

“Everybody knows I have a good changeup, but I wanted something with speed,” Perez said. “This year, my curve is better and I wanted to try the cutter. In the past, I tried it and if it wasn’t good, I’d throw it out. But now I’ve got more confidence. I can throw it and I feel great.”

Doolittle tells Susan Slusser he is refining what he throws as well as his confidence in this new pitches.

“Just because I have a new toy, I can’t change the way I pitch too much,” he said. “But I had a lot of innings last year where I had a lot of long battles with hitters fouling balls off. If I can get a guy on three pitches instead of having those kinds of battles, that will be a lot better than those 20-pitch innings.”

Odorizzi tells Roger Mooney he is evolving his changeup into a splitter to mimic the one his teammate, Alex Cobb, throws.

“I had an all right change-up. It wasn’t anything special, wasn’t anything terrible. It was just average,” Odorizzi said. “I wanted something I could throw more consistent and have more movement as opposed to speed-wise. I don’t know how they are speed-wise compared to each other, but the movement alone on the new pitch makes a world of difference, honestly. Even if it’s bad, it’s got movement.”

Adding a pitch to one’s repertoire is no magic elixir to cure a pitcher’s ills on the mound. It did help Wade Davis when he moved from the Tampa Bay rotation to the bullpen in 2012 as the addition of a cutter plus the increased velocity he utilized as a reliever allowed him to dominate in high leverage situations that season. Detwiler added a slider in 2012 and saw his overall SwStr% improve 18% from the previous season. Buchholz added a splitter after the 2011 season and his SwStr% declined from the previous season as did his K%. Kevin Correia added a cutter in 2010 and saw his K% improve five full percentage points, only to plummet six percentage points the next year. Sometimes, adding a new pitch is not enough and is only a temporary band aid to the problem and a pitcher decides to blow it up and start from scratch

Danny Farquhar serves as a most recent example of how rebuilding from square one can change a pitcher’s fortune. In a two-month span during the 2012 season, Farquhar was involved in the following roster moves:

DFA’d by Toronto
Claimed by Oakland
DFA’d by Oakland
Claimed by New York
DFA’d by New York
Outrighted to Double-A
Assigned to Triple-A
Traded to Seattle for Ichiro Suzuki

During all of those moves, Farquhar went through multiple reviews and arm angles before finally settling on his current one with the Mariners. Once he nailed down an arm angle, he added a curveball to his repertoire. A strong start to the Triple-A season with the new approach vaulted him to the Seattle bullpen for good in mid-May. As he explained to Ryan Divish:

“It’s a big off-speed pitch that I need to continue to throw for strikes; continue to mix in there because I have the fastball and cutter, which are two hard pitches…..even if it’s just showing it to hitters, it’s changing the speed, changing the plane and the eye level. The curveball is a big difference maker.”

The new arm angle and new approach helped Farquhar post one of the 50 best K% for a reliever with at least 50 innings of work in a season in the past 15 seasons. Rather than rest on his laurels, he is continuing to evolve as a pitcher in 2014 joining the cool kids by adding a new pitch – a two-seam fastball – as well as utilizing his changeup more frequently. Normally, the addition of those two pitches would be suggested for a reliever that has issues against opposite-handed batters, but that is not the case for Farquhar as left-handed batters hit 84 points worse and struck out 17% more frequently against him than right-handed batters.

Farquhar’s proactive approach to his craft is something he explained to Jason Churchill back in January:

“My big work-in-progress is a two-seam fastball, like a good, consistent two-seam fastball, and I want to start it on the left-hander’s hip and let it run back over the plate.” As Farquhar went on to say, he uses his cutter in on the hands of lefties and a biting two-seamer is the perfect counter for that, since it’s movement is the exact opposite, despite the pitch looking nearly identical to the hitter.”

The new pitch will give left-handed batters more to think about when he comes inside on them. Instead of just being able to guess cutter, they’ll now have even less time to read cutter or two-seam fastball and may allow Farquhar to collect a few more strikeouts looking as well as some poorly-struck baseballs as he sets up new closer Fernando Rodney.

Farquhar and the other 25 pitchers on the list are simply heeding the advice of Tupac Shakur who once said, “I want to grow. I want to be better…We’re made to grow. You either evolve or disappear.” That applies to one’s hip-hop career as much as it does one’s baseball career as starting pitchers attempt to remain in rotations and relievers avoid becoming the next fungible commodity.

I remember a Sunday several years ago, when I was in college, when I got myself all interested in pitcher release points. I wasn’t interested in anything, specifically — I just wanted to come up with some kind of measurement, because I hadn’t seen data like that before. So I spent many, many hours capturing screenshots from MLB.tv and marking pixel coordinates on a spreadsheet. In that way, I worked hard to estimate a handful of release points from one pitcher, and I was satisfied, at least with the concept. I felt like the labor was worthwhile. These days you can get release-point information instantly, and it’s better and a hell of a lot more thorough.

The advantage of having all this information is that we get to have all this information. If there’s a disadvantage, it’s that it used to be fun to try to figure things out by hand. Analysis used to take longer, and be longer. It was a journey, for everyone involved. Now almost everything’s quantified. The ESPN Home Run Tracker can spit out tons of details about every single home run hit during the season. It’s insane, how far we’ve come. Oh, but, the ESPN Home Run Tracker isn’t active during spring training. And Giancarlo Stanton plays in spring training.

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Yesterday, I created a model of agent pricing using projected 2014 WAR as the only variable. As I noted in the post, I would classify this model as more of a toy than a rigorous attempt at analyzing the market, as we know there are plenty of factors beyond next season’s performance that influence the size of a free agent contract. Ignoring age and health are obvious flaws, as both are significant factors in contract size, especially when forecasting how many years a player might sign for. And we know that the market pays a different price for offense than it does for defense, reflecting some of the uncertainty that the defensive evaluations have relative to our ability to measure offensive production.

So, before I say any more about this model, let’s remember that this was essentially designed as something like the Marcel projections for salaries. Tom Tango built the Marcel projections as something of a baseline forecast, using very simplistic adjustments and ignoring things like park factors in order to show the bare minimum that a projection system should be able to accomplish. Likewise, I’d say that any serious attempt at evaluating the free agent market should be able to do better than what this basic model can do. This system is as simple as it gets — without being completely wrong, anyway — and we can almost certainly do better, but doing better comes with added complexity, and it’s still nice to have a simple, easily explained baseline to measure other forecasts against.

That said, let’s see what this basic pricing model — naming suggestions welcome, by the way — spits out for a dozen of the more notable 2015 free agents. For now, let’s ignore the future and pretend that these 12 players were free agents this past off-season, and see what the model would have forecast for them as 2014 free agents. As a reminder, we’re using a hybrid ZIPS/Steamer WAR forecasts, and the model multiplies projected WAR by five to estimate annual average value and projected WAR by 2.0 (for 3+ WAR players), 1.5 (for +2.0 to +2.9 WAR players), or 1.1 (for 1.0-1.9 WAR players) to estimate the number of years a player will sign for.

Because I selected 12 of the more notable pending free agents, we’re only looking at players with either a 2.0 or 1.5 multiple, as they’re all projected as above average performers for 2014. On to the forecasts:

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There’s nothing at all strange about a city the size of Denver having a major-league baseball team. I’ve been to Denver. Not only is it big enough to have multiple gas stations — it’s big enough to have multiple kinds of gas stations. Where things do get strange is in the details. Denver, of course, is really high up, relative to where sea level is, and that makes for an unavoidably different baseballing experience. There’s nothing, really, to be done about it. Baseball in Denver’s played at altitude, so baseball in Denver’s a different sort of baseball.

Things happen differently there, and for that reason Denver’s a perfect case for why park factors have to exist for analysts to get anywhere. It’s simply an extreme hitter-friendly run environment. Now, when it comes to games in Denver, everyone, at least, is on a level playing field (literally!) (figuratively too). But there are games played outside of Denver, and additionally, there are players who are removed from Denver. Whenever a position player leaves the Rockies, people get worried that he’s going to fall apart, because he’ll miss the lopsided circumstances. With players who used to play in Colorado, there’s a tendency to be cautious, and perhaps even skeptical.

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There’s bad days, and then there’s what Sergio Romo had against the Mariners in the midst of an 18-3 thrashing on Saturday. Romo faced five batters in the eighth inning, and you can imagine the type of opposition you face in the eighth inning of a Cactus League game on March 8:

1. Leon Landry singles to right. Most people don’t know who Leon Landry is. I only do because I remember the Dodgers trading him for Brandon League. Landry hit .216/.262/.303 as a 23-year-old in Double-A last year. Somehow, Seattle still won that trade.
2. Ketel Marte singles to right. I have absolutely no idea who Ketel Marte is, though he appears to not be related to Starling, Alfredo, Damaso, Andy or vodka.
3. Ty Kelly walks. Ty, or Tyler, Kelly, was apparently traded to Seattle last year for Eric Thames. Thames hit .252/.315/.356 in Triple-A for Baltimore, was picked up on waivers by Houston in September, and was released in December to sign in Korea. That is what Ty Kelly was traded for.
4. Tyler Smith walks. As I’ve moved into my 30s, I’ve become resigned to the fact that every male younger than me is named “Tyler” or “Austin.” And wouldn’t you know it, there were three different Tyler Smiths in pro ball last year alone. This one was drafted out of Oregon State in June, and played for Pulaski. Bonus points if you can identify the state “Pulaski” is in.
5. Ji-Man Choi singles. Now there’s a name you know, if only because “Ji-Man” is an 80 name. Despite a .411 minor league OBP, Choi didn’t rank on our top 15 Mariners prospects, and didn’t rank on the same list of most other sites.

I could do the same for his first outing of the spring, when he allowed six runs in an inning to Oakland, but the point here isn’t really to go on a tour of the lower levels of the American League West. The point is that there’s a sizable portion of you, I imagine, who have heard of zero of those five names. And yet Sergio Romo, World Series closer, All-Star, among the best relievers in the game for the last five years, managed to retire exactly none of them. After four games, Romo has faced 23 batters, allowed 14 of them to reach, and 12 to score (11 earned).

So… panic, right? Even within the context of “spring numbers don’t matter”, because no quality big leaguer should have such trouble with a collection of names like that without hiding some kind of serious injury.  Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that strikeouts are up, league-wide. And they aren’t only up from where they were in the past — they continue to rise, having risen eight consecutive years. The average batter last year struck out about once per five trips to the plate. Compared to 2005, last year there were five more strikeouts per two games. There is, of course, a limit to how high the strikeout rate can go, and strikeouts in 2013 were barely up from where they were in 2012, but still, it’s an important trend, and for some people it’s a worrisome one. I know that former colleague Rob Neyer has expressed much concern over how many strikeouts there are in the game today.

No one disagrees about the fact. Strikeouts are recorded by record-keepers, and the frequency of strikeouts is up. The real question concerns the explanation. Plenty of people have provided plenty of possible reasons for why the game has gone as it has. For example, a year ago, Dave noted a connection between the recent rise in strikeouts and the roll-out of PITCHf/x. The system allows for an accurate evaluation of the zone, and as it turns out, the zone has been growing. That’s some fascinating research, right there, but I wonder: how might we be able to isolate the strikeout effect of PITCHf/x? We can’t, really, but we can try. We just need to look somewhere else.

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Last week, in a move that has been hailed as simultaneously “bold” and “very bold” by the author himself, I published a largely irresponsible leaderboard of regressed pitching leaders from spring training so far.

That post’s existence in the world was predicated on three conditions, as follow:

(a) Spring-training stats don’t appear to be very predictive of regular-season stats; but

(b) The return of baseball is exciting, and invites consideration of some sort; and

(c) Research suggests that, of all spring-training stats, pitcher strikeouts and (to a lesser degree) walks are probably the closest thing to predictive.

Owing to the wild success of that first post, what follows is the a second — and ever current — SCOUT pitching leaderboard for spring training. SCOUT- combines regressed strikeout and walk rates in a kwERA-like equation to produce a number not unlike ERA-, where 100 is league average and below 100 is better than average. Note that xK% and xBB% stand for expected strikeout and walk rate, respectively.

Some notes:

• Washington’s Taylor Jordan has produced the most impressive spring-training performance among all pitchers, it would appear. His most recent appearance, this past Saturday against a lineup of mostly Atlanta starters, was the best of his three total ones (box): 3.0 IP, 12 TBF, 6 K, 0 BB. While Ross Detwiler is probably the favorite to win the last spot in the Nationals rotation, Jordan could merit consideration for starting duties, as well.
• Since last week’s edition of the irresponsible leaderboard, Detroit reliever Luke Putkonen has recorded two appearances and 3.0 innings, posting a 4:0 strikeout-to-walk ratio in the process. The performance isn’t very surprising: he produced an 87 xFIP- in ca. 30 major-league innings last year.
• Toronto’s Drew Hutchison produced this past week the second of his two very strong spring appearances, recording the following line (box): 3.0 IP, 12 TBF, 5 K, 1 BB. Hutchison has an “outside chance” of winning a rotation spot, said John Farrell* at the beginning of the month. One assumes his spring thus far hasn’t hurt those chances.

*As several readers have noted, it is John Gibbons and not Farrell currently employed to manage the Blue Jays.

Back in November, Ken Rosenthal reported that the asking price for Ervin Santana was “more than $100 million on a five year deal…” It’s mid-March, Santana is still unsigned, and over the weekend, he left the Proformance agency and is now looking to sign a one year deal for essentially the value of the qualifying offer. Instead of $100+ million over five years, he’s going to get $13 or $14 million for one year, and then try again next winter.

It didn’t have to be this way, of course. In that same early off-season report, Rosenthal listed Ricky Nolasco’s asking price at $80 million over five years; he signed for $50 million over four instead. It’s not that unusual for agents to throw out a high early valuation in an attempt to give themselves room to make concessions while still landing a high value contract. The problem for Santana isn’t so much that his initial ask was absurd — it was, of course — but that it didn’t adjust downwards quickly enough as the market told him that it was absurd. With a more aggressive response to what the market was saying about his value, Santana likely could have landed a deal in that $40 to $50 million range earlier in the off-season, before teams spent their money on other alternatives.

But because someone in Santana’s camp believed they could land a deal closer to their original price, the market moved on without him. His story is an example of how harmful it can be to have an unrealistic baseline heading into free agency. And unfortunately for Santana, the market simply doesn’t care about W/L record and ERA the way it used to. Anyone developing a free agent pricing model based on outdated statistics is going to be in for a rude awakening when the offers actually come rolling in, because teams are better at forecasting future value for aging free agents than they were even five years ago.

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Once upon a time, Franklin Morales was the future of the Rockies. That time was 2007 and 2008, but things have never really worked out the way they were supposed to for the Venezuelan lefty. Now though, he has a World Series ring, but more importantly, another opportunity to be a starting pitcher in the major leagues. Back in Colorado, Jhoulys Chacin’s spring training injury and Brett Anderson’s overall brittleness signal that the Rockies are going to need plenty of starting pitchers this season, and while Morales may not be in the rotation come Opening Day, he has a chance to be one of the first off the depth chart. It may be his last chance to prove he can start in the majors.

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